Fact Check: Viral video of TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu criticising Modi is from 2019

The clip is from February 2019, when Naidu spoke to NDTV during a dharna in New Delhi to demand special status for Andhra Pradesh.

After the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and Andhra Pradesh Assembly elections were declared, a video (here and here) of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief N. Chandrababu Naidu criticising Narendra Modi has been doing the rounds on social media.

In this video, Naidu can be seen talking to senior NDTV journalist Sreenivasan Jain, and saying that his party joined hands with Modi in the past out of political compulsion. He is further heard saying, “All leaders are better than Narendra Modi” and that “after elections, Prime Ministers were chosen”. We fact-check this claim in this article.

An archived version of this can be found here.

Firstly, a quick keyword search on the internet with relevant keywords revealed that the viral video is a short clip from an almost 13-minute-long video report published by NDTV on YouTube in February 2019.

This was a report on a protest named ‘dharma porata deeksha’ held (here, here, and here) by Chandrababu Naidu in 2019 in New Delhi, demanding special status to Andhra Pradesh.

The clip in the viral video can be seen from the 7:02 mark. This makes it clear that a video that predates the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is being shared as a recent video of Naidu criticising Modi.

After the Telugu Desam Party, Jana Sena and BJP’s alliance won the 2024 Assembly elections, Chandrababu Naidu held a press conference on 5 June, 2024, streamed on the TDP’s official YouTube channel. In this press conference, Naidu said that he wanted to meet the media and thank the people of AP for giving the alliance a clear mandate, before he left for a meeting in New Delhi. At around the 21:29 mark in the video, he says, “We are in NDA, I am going for an NDA meeting. In (the)course of time..anything, we will report to you.” This contradicts the viral claim.

To sum up, an old video from 2019 is being passed off as Naidu criticising Narendra Modi after the TDP-Jana Sena-BJP alliance won in the 2024 Assembly and Lok Sabha elections in Andhra Pradesh.

This story was originally published by Factly as part of the Shakti Collective. Apart from the headline, excerpt and introduction, this story has not been edited by ThePrint staff.