Viral photos of Rahul Gandhi with Jyoti Malhotra are morphed
After Haryana YouTuber Jyoti Malhotra was arrested for espionage and leaking intel to Pakistan, her pictures with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi went viral on social media. Users sharing these images questioned her association with Gandhi and insinuated that traitors of the country are often seen with him.
Sharing two images on X, user Manoj Srivastava (@ManojSr60583090) wrote, “Jyoti Malhotra, caught spying for Pakistan, is with traitor Rahul Gandhi, it is a strange coincidence that every traitor is seen with Rahul Gandhi.”
Another X user, Jayant Rokde (@jayant_rokade), also shared the pictures with a similar caption.
Several others also linked her to Rahul Gandhi. (Archives 1, 2, 3)
Click to view slideshow.
Fact Check
Image 1: A reverse image search of Rahul Gandhi’s photo with ‘Jyoti’, who is in a blue saree, led us to several news reports from 2018 in which a very similar image appeared. However, the woman in the photo is then-Congress MLA from Rae Bareli, Aditi Singh, not Jyoti Malhotra. Below is a screenshot from a report by ABP News dated May 7, 2018.
Taking cue from the caption in the ABP report, we looked at Singh’s Facebook page, where she had shared the same photo in 2017, wishing Rahul Gandhi on his birthday. Note that Singh resigned from Congress in 2021 and joined the BJP. She is currently a BJP MLA from Rae Bareli.
The comparison below clearly shows that Jyoti Malhotra’s face has been superimposed on Singh’s face in the viral photo.
Image 2: To check the image where Rahul Gandhi can be seen with a woman in a blue kurta, Alt News performed a reverse image search and found a similar image posted on Rahul Gandhi’s Facebook page on September 18, 2022. In this picture, too, the woman’s face is different and not of the arrested YouTuber.
We also found another picture of Rahul Gandhi with the same woman in the blue kurta on X account of the Mahila Congress. This was also shared in September 2022 during Kerala run of the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
On comparing the viral image with the one on Rahul Gandhi’s Facebook page, we found that Jyoti Malhotra’s face had been superimposed on it.
Also, we found no credible news reports indicating the two had met.
To sum up, the viral pictures are not of Rahul Gandhi with Jyoti Malhotra but of him with other women. These original pictures from 2017 and 2022 have been digitally manipulated by superimposing Jyoti Malhotra’s face on others to make it seem like they had met before. Similarly baseless claims linking Jyoti Malhotra to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav also did the rounds on social media. Alt News had fact checked these too. Read: Jyoti Malhotra, arrested on charges of ‘spying’, seen with PM Modi? False claim shared and Viral photo of Akhilesh Yadav with Jyoti Malhotra, arrested on charges of ‘spying’, is fake
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