A quote which says that Bollywood actor and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate “Kangana Ranaut has problems with every actor except Narendra Modi,” has gone viral on social media.
The claim: Those sharing the statement have attributed it to Bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah.
An archive of this post can be seen here.
At the time of writing this report, this post had gathered over 6.2 lakh views, 41,000 likes, and more than 6,600 shares.
The Quint also received queries for this quote’s verification on its WhatsApp tipline.
(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here and here.)
But, Shah did not make this statement.
We found that the quote originated from a parody X account, which does not exist anymore.
Speaking to The Quint for an earlier fact-check, the actor’s wife, actor Ratna Pathak Shah, confirmed that her husband did not have an X account.
How did we find out?: Using the quote as keywords, we looked for information related to the source of the quote.
This led us to several posts from 2021 on Facebook, when the same claim went viral.One of these posts carried a screenshot of an X post, with the username ‘@naseruddin_shah’.
When we looked for this account on X, the platform said that the account did not exist anymore.
Old posts from the account: We looked for archives of the account using Wayback Machine, an internet archiving website.
This led us to some archived posts from 2021, one of which was a post showing support for farmers during the 2020-2021 protests.
In this post, the account’s display name carried the hashtag ‘#parody’, indicating that this was not Shah’s real account.
Misinformation from an imposter account: In 2021, Team WebQoof had gone through this account in a fact-check, when it had gained traction during the farmers’ protests, to check its authenticity.
We had found that the account used to operate with a different username, impersonating Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) Rakesh Tikait.
The Quint had also reached out the Shah’s wife, actor Ratna Pathak Shah, who told us that Naseeruddin Shah “does not have any Twitter account.”
Conclusion: A quote about actor Kangana Ranaut and PM Modi from a non-existent account impersonating actor Naseeruddin Shah has gone viral as a statement by Shah.
(This story was originally published by The Quint, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective.)
