Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ( AFP / DIPTENDU DUTTA)

Posts mispresent India PM Modi's speech at rally

This article is more than one year old.
Published on June 30, 2021 at 10:32
2 min read
By AFP India

A video has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple Facebook posts that claim it shows India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling himself a "thief" at a rally. The posts are misleading: in the full speech, Modi was narrating the story of a thief and was not talking about himself.

The video was posted on Facebook here on May 3, 2021 by an account with about 200,000 followers.

It has been viewed more than 50,000 times.

The 10-second clip shows Modi speaking to a crowd at a rally.

His comments in Hindi translate to English as: “If my mother had stopped me when I committed small thefts, I would not be such a big thief now.”

The post's caption repeats Modi’s words.

A screenshot of the misleading post taken on June 29, 2021.

The video was posted alongside a similar claim on Facebook here, here, here and here

The posts are misleading: a longer video of Modi’s speech shows he was actually narrating a story about a thief, not calling himself one.

The 10-second clip was taken from this video of a speech Modi gave during elections in the state of West Bengal on April 10, 2021.

The 57-minute 17-second video was uploaded on Modi’s official YouTube channel.

In the full speech, Modi can be heard narrating the story of a thief.

“When I was young, I heard a story”, he says at the video's 39-minute 40-second mark. “In that story, a big thief was sentenced to death by hanging. Before the sentencing, he was asked if he had any last wish. He said, "I want to meet my mother". The government arranged for him to meet his mother before his punishment. When he met his mother, he roughly cut her nose off. He cut his own mother’s nose off! So people asked him, "Why did you do this to your own mother?" He said: "If my mother had stopped me when I committed small thefts, I would not be such a big thief now"."

Modi narrated the story after he accused West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her party -- the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) -- of corruption.

The news was covered by Indian media sites ABP News and The Hindu BusinessLine.

Below is a comparison of the video in the misleading post (L) and the video on Modi’s official YouTube account (R):

AFP previously debunked posts that misrepresented a speech by Indian opposition politician Rahul Gandhi here.

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