The meeting occurred in June 2015, after Manmohan Singh’s tenure as PM had ended.
A video of some foreign dignitaries meeting former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Congress leader Sonia Gandhi is going viral on social media with the claim that the video was from the time Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister, and that it was Sonia Gandhi who received the guests, leaving the Prime Minister aside.
The caption states, “India’s weakest Prime Minister, nothing more than Sonia Gandhi’s puppet. #ManMohanSingh #SoniaGandhi”
Let’s check the truth
The same post is going viral on Facebook as well.
Fact Check-
We started our investigation with a reverse image search on Google and the results led us to a similar video uploaded on the Congress party’s YouTube channel on 16 June, 2015, with the caption “Congress President’s meeting with Chinese delegation.”
According to the description in the posts, this was a meeting between the then Congress President Sonia Gandhi and a Chinese delegation. At that time, Manmohan Singh was not the Prime Minister of India. He was the Prime Minister of India at various times from 2004 to 2014.
Moving forward, we found several news reports of a meeting between the Chinese delegation and Sonia Gandhi. Zhang Dejiang, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China, met Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh at their residence on 16 June, 2015. Zhang Dejiang visited Sonia Gandhi at her residence after meeting the then Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Press Information Bureau issued a press release on 15 June, 2015 regarding Zhang Dejiang’s meeting with the Prime Minister. An image of the delegation being welcomed can be seen in a news report published by Zee News on June 16, 2015:
We also found a twitter post from the official handle of Congress shared on 16 June, 2015, in which Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh are pictured with a foreign delegation. The caption says that a Chinese parliamentary delegation met Congress President Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
So, it is evident that the video is from a time when Manmohan Singh was not the Prime Minister of India. The foreign delegation met with the then-Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, who served from 1998 to 2017 and again from 2019 to 2022. Manmohan Singh was there as the Congress party’s leader, not as the Prime Minister. And it was fitting that the delegation was met first by Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
Conclusion-
Fact Crescendo found that the claim made along with the viral video to be Misleading. The meeting occurred in June 2015, after Manmohan Singh’s tenure as PM had ended. He and Sonia Gandhi met a Chinese parliamentary delegation led by Zhang Dejiang as Congress party leaders.
Title:Video of Dr Manmohan Singh meeting Chinese Delegation goes viral with misleading claims
Fact Check By: Usha ManojResult: Misleading
