Fact-Check: 2012 pic of PM Modi with ducks viral as "PR stunt amid COVID"

The official Twitter handle of the Congress on Wednesday (August 26) shared an image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with ducks and accused him of making PR videos instead of helping his countrymen in the fight against COVID-19.

The tweet by the Congress came days after PM Modi uploaded a video in which he was seen feeding peacocks at his Lok Kalyan Marg residence in New Delhi.

The claim

In the image shared by the Congress, a rather young-looking PM Modi is holding a DSLR in his hands as ducks surround him.

"Picture this: There's a global pandemic & economic recession but the leader of the 3rd most affected country is making PR videos instead of helping his people. Sounds unreal doesn't it?" read the caption of the post while the title of the picture said, "Why is Modi ji DUCKING from his responsibilities?"

The image went viral in no time with a number of social media users circulating it heavily across different platforms.

A Twitter account by the name 'Spirit of Congress' even claimed that as many as 100 takes were done to get the picture right. "A reliable source say that more than 100 outtakes were done before clicking this picture. It took almost 7 hours to complete the task. All this during pandemic when country is reeling from job loss, students crisis & 1000s of COVID-19 deaths," read the tweet.

Fact-Check

A simple Google reverse image search revealed that the viral picture was actually taken 8 years back, which is not at all surprising considering PM Modi's look in it.

The image was found in a 2012 blog post by Sunday Guardian editorial director Madhav Das Nalapat, who had interviewed PM Modi while he was serving as the Chief Minister of Gujarat.

The blog post also carries several other similar looking pictures of the BJP leader that were shared by a bunch of Twitter users as recent.

Below is a screenshot of Nalapat's 2012 blog post:

Therefore, it can be concluded that old photographs of PM Modi are being shared across social media to target him for resorting to PR stunts amid the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic.