A cropped video of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is being shared on social media with a false claim that he voiced support for gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, saying that he would ensure that no one could touch the latter.
BOOM found that the video has been cropped and clip has been taken from a 2020 speech of Singh in which he was assuring the Muslim community that they would not be affected by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government had introduced.
In the viral video Singh can be heard saying, "I want to say with certainty, as the defence minister of India, that leave alone taking away citizenship, no one will be able to touch them even with a finger. I assure you."
The video is being shared on social media with the caption that claims, "Defense Minister Rajnath Singh: No one can touch Lawrence Bishnoi with a finger. Defense Ministry's order"
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the viral video has been cropped to make the false claim that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has voiced his support for gangster Lawrence Bishnoi. In the original video which is from a speech Singh had given in January 2020, he was reassuring the Muslim community that they would not be affected by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 that the government had brought in December 2019.
We broke the video into key-frames and ran a reverse image search using Google Lens. The viral video has been taken from a speech that Singh gave on January 29, 2020, that was live-streamed on his official YouTube channel.
In the speech, Singh was referring to Indian Muslims while saying, "leave alone taking away citizenship, nobody can touch any Indian Muslim", to dispel fears that the community would be targeted using the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) act.
From the 45.60 minutes timestamp Singh can be heard saying, "Any Muslim who is a citizen on India, I want to say with certainty, as the defence minister of India, that leave alone taking away citizenship, no one will be able to touch them even with a finger. I assure you."
The part where he mentions Indian Muslims has been cropped out of the viral video to make the false claim that he is talking about gangster Lawrence Bishnoi. The full speech can be seen below:
