A viral image showing Sonia Gandhi's bookshelf has a book titled ' How to convert India into a Christian nation', a Holy Bible and a statue of Jesus is morphed and fake.
The photo tweeted and then deleted by the Twitter user NoConversion also carried a watermark of the handle name. The handle @noconversion, set up on September 21st, 2014, has garnered a following of over two lakh followers and regularly tweets communal content focusing on anti-Christian tweets.
NoConversion tweeted the photo without drawing focus on the morphed additon of the books and statue with a caption that said, "Who reads all these books?"
The photo was later deleted without an explanation. View an archive here
Several Twitter users posted the image believing it to be true.
François Gautier who describes himself as a writer and has over 63000 Twitter followers also posted the viral edited image cropping out Gandhi and zooming in on the book and statue.
Click here, here and here to see the archive of these posts.
The image is also being circulated on Facebook with the same false claim.
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Fact Check
BOOM analysed the image and found that the book 'How to convert India into a Christian nation', the Holy Bible and the statue have been edited into the image to make the false claim.
A reverse image search for the viral image led us to the original photo taken from a video shared by Rahul Gandhi in October 2020. The viral image is a screen grab from the video where Gandhi is appealing to the citizens of Bihar to vote for the Mahagathbandhan and was posted before the Bihar Legislative Assembly elections held in 2020.
Watch the full video below:
Gandhi is seen wearing the same attire as in the viral image. The bookshelf behind her shows that there is no Bible, a statue of Jesus or a book titled 'How to convert India into a Christian nation'. The space where the the Holy Bible is seen in the viral photo is empty in the original and the conversion to Christianity book has been added by editing the title of another book. The statue of Jesus is nowhere to be seen in the bookshelf. All three of them have been edited into the photo to make the false claim.
Here is a comparison of the viral photo and the original image.
We also found a Hindustan Times report from 2020 carrying the same image of Sonia Gandhi confirming that no such book was present in the bookshelf.
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