Congress files complaint against filmmaker for fake video of Rahul Gandhi ‘refusing to do aarti’

Taking strong action against filmmaker Ashok Pandit for circulating a fake video of Rahul Gandhi and claiming that the Congress leader was refusing to offer prayers, the Congress filed a complaint against the film director and said that Ashoke Pandit has a history of sharing such posts.

“Ashoke Pandit deleted his posts immediately after the same was exposed to be a bare-faced lie. This underscores the illegality of his action and he must be called to account for the same,” the complaint said.

The video went viral in the last few days claiming that Rahul Gandhi denied to perform aarti. “Janeudhaari Rahul Gandhi is refusing to perform aarti. The reasons are clear,” Ashoke Pandit wrote in his now-deleted tweet. The claim was busted by fact-checkers who found that the photos used in the morphed video were from Rajasthan in 2017 when Rahul Gandhi had actually performed the aarti.

“The video was created by morphing (through deliberately edition) an older video in which Shri Rahul Gandhi was indeed offering prayers in direct contradiction to what was being portrayed by Ashoke Pandit,” the complaint said.

“This was nothing short of a deliberate and motivated attempt to outrage religious sentiments of members of Hindu community using deliberately falsified videos,” it read.

The party, in the complaint, said Ashoke Pandit did similar things in past and has a following of more than 3 lakhs on Twitter. “It is Ashoke Pandit who has used this distorted video to intentionally insult Goddess Durga, a deity of supreme significance in the religion thereby provoking any and all persons who believe in the deity, while being fully aware that the general public will be outraged and disturbed by such (false) allegations,” the party said.

The tweet and the fake video were also an attempt to tarnish the image of the party and the party members, the complaint said.

Sharing a copy of the complaint, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said though Ashoke Pandit deleted the social media post, he will have to face the law for his “atrocious deed”. “We will not allow such people to get away lightly,” Jairam Ramesh tweeted.