New Delhi: A video showing Prime Minister Narendra Modi giving a speech and purportedly saying that educated countries use ballot papers, while uneducated people in India cast votes through EVMs, is being shared on social media with the claim that Modi preferred ballot papers over EVM before he came to power in 2014.
BOOM found this claim to be false. The viral clip has been cropped from a speech given by Modi at Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad in December 2016—after he came to power as prime minister. Furthermore, a longer version of the clip shows Modi praising India’s use of EVMs and criticises the countries that still use ballot papers.
“Our country is poor, our people are illiterate that they don’t know anything. Brothers and sisters, when an election takes place in educated countries, ballot papers are still used for elections even today. There, the voters read the names on ballot papers and then put a stamp on them, even in America,” he can be heard saying in the viral post.
The video was shared with the caption, “Elections should be conducted using ballot papers rather than EVMs. Even the people of America use ballot paper not EVMs. —Narendra Modi before 2014”.
Click here to view the post, and here to view an archive.
2016 speech cropped
BOOM did a few keyword searches to find instances of Modi speaking about ballot papers and EVMs, and found that the clip going viral was taken from a speech he gave in Moradabad on 3 December, 2016.
We found the entire speech on Modi’s official YouTube channel, and the cropped portion of the speech is at the 55.10 mark.
Listening to the longer version of the speech, we found that Modi was criticising those who call Indians illiterate and praising India’s use of technology while citing the example of EVMs used for casting votes as opposed to ballot papers being used in other countries, where he gives the example of the US.
Furthermore, the speech was made in 2016, after Modi came to power as prime minister, which disproves the claim that the speech was made before 2014.
This story was originally published by Boom as part of the Shakti Collective. Apart from the headline, excerpt and introduction, this story has not been edited by ThePrint staff.