Fact-check: Has Rahul Gandhi booked a ticket to Bangkok after poll results are out?
Several viral posts on social media say that Rahul has booked a ticket on a Vistara flight.
Several viral posts on social media say that Rahul has booked a ticket on a Vistara flight.
Several viral posts on social media say that Rahul has booked a ticket on a Vistara flight.
Is Congress leader Rahul Gandhi planning to fly to Bangkok on June 5 after the day of counting in the Lok Sabha election? Several viral posts on social media say that Rahul has booked a ticket on a Vistara flight to the internationally renowned tourism destination in Thailand that day and display an image of a boarding pass with Rahul’s name.
An alert in this regard was received by Shakti Collective, formed to prevent the circulation of fake news during the Parliament elections, and the results of the fact-check were published on Newschecker.
Investigation
The boarding pass displays two different flight numbers, which indicates that they were digitally edited.
When a reverse image search of the viral image was carried out, a similar photo was seen on LiveFromALounge.com, an online platform that publishes news and images related to aviation, hotels, travellers’ experiences, loyalty programmes and travel trends.
The photo of the boarding pass accompanies an article headlined ‘Vistara to Singapore; Vistara’s first international flight’ published on August 7, 2019. It was written by Ajay Awtaney, founder and editor of LiveFromALounge. The description with the image of the boarding pass says that, “I could travel on Vistara’s first service on a domestic route in 2015. Now I have flown from Delhi to Singapore on Vistara’s international flight launched in July 2019.”
A comparison of the image of Awtaney’s boarding pass with the viral photo reveals that Rahul’s purported boarding pass is a morphed image of the photo in LiveFromALounge.
Awtaney was contacted over the matter and his response was, “I travelled from Delhi to Singapore on Vistara’s first international flight in July 2019 and posted an image related to the journey on my website, LiveFromALongue. The image that has gone viral now is an edited version of the real photo.”
Fact
The image of Rahul’s boarding pass is edited from a photo uploaded by an aviation columnist on his website.