Rahul Gandhi, former head of the Congress, posted a video showing a huge throng waiting to exit a full train at a Mumbai stop, claiming that the large crowd of students in Uttar Pradesh swarming outside a packed train to take the Preliminary Eligibility Test (PET).
Gandhi posted this video to criticise the Uttar Pradesh administration for not providing transportation for test-takers to go to their allotted locations.
Gandhi shared the video in the context of the UP-PET examinations that were conducted on October 15, 2022, and there were reports of very heavy student congestion on public transit to go to various locations.
However, the video was deleted after a moment and we couldn’t archive it.
However, Boom Factcheck retrieved the video from the Twitter analytics tool Trendsmap. The link to the archive version of old video can be found here.
Credit: Screengrab/Boom
After deleting the video, Rahul Gandhi posted another video and launched a scathing attack on the Modi government over increasing unemployment with the same caption.
Caption: Rahul Gandhi/Twitter
The video was captioned (in Hindi) “Total applications – 37 lakh. Vacant posts – very few! These youths were promised 2 crore jobs annually, but in these pictures only the helplessness of the educated unemployed youth of the country is visible. It is clear that the Prime Minister is sitting blindly. And the youth are forced to face stumbling blocks.”
The link to the tweet can be found here. The post showed a train coach swarmed up with youth.
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FactO Check
The Boom investigated the video by inspecting the screenshot of the archived video, which has been deleted by Rahul Gandhi, and found the image as a Mumbai local train. It also noted that the identical video had gone viral the previous year falsely showing a packed local train at Mumbai’s Borivali station on February 1, 2021, the day the Maharashtra government began local rail services in Mumbai.
The Boom also found that the video has been on the internet since 2016. The Link to the video can be found here.
Credit: YouTube
In the video’s description, which was posted on March 21, 2016, with the caption “Amazing Mumbai local crowd.” However, the name of the railway station is not mentioned.
However, we were not able to find out the whereabouts of the video. Still, it is inevitable that it has nothing to do with the mismanagement of UP PET examination for which Rahul Gandhi attacked the Modi government at the center since the video has been there on the internet since 2016.
Conclusion
The Video shared by Rahul Gandhi (now deleted) was misleading and it has nothing to do with UP PET examinations.