Social media has been abuzz with black and white footage of a man performing yoga as it is being shared as a rare and unseen clip of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from his younger days.
The 2 minutes 18 seconds long video went viral within a few hours of making it on popular social media platforms. However, the claims made in regard to the clip are false as the man in it is late yoga teacher BKS Iyengar and not PM Modi.
The claim
The said footage is doing rounds on the internet with Hindi captions translating to "Rare footage of Modi ji performing yoga" and "You must have never seen this form of yoga form of Modi ji".
With netizens falling for the claim instantly, the clip has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook and Twitter.
Check out the video here:
मोदी जी का यह योगी रूप आपने कभी नही देखा होगा। pic.twitter.com/69iIrCbj6M
— Gajendra Chauhan (@Gajjusay) November 24, 2020
Fact-check:
On coming across the purported clip on the micro-blogging website, International Business Times, India, conducted a fact-check and found the claims of it being rare footage of a young PM Modi to be false.
We took a screengrab from the viral video and carried out a reverse image search in order to investigate the claims. The search results showed that the footage in question was originally uploaded by a YouTube channel named Tom Martin on May 31, 2009, and that the man in it is actually legendary yoga teacher BKS Iyengar.
"Iyengar & Krishnamacharya's Yoga in 1938," read the title of the YouTube video. We also dug out a bunch of media reports which talked about a 1938 clip of BKS Iyengar and his teacher T Krishnamacharya.
Furthermore, the late yoga guru's daughter Sunita Parthasarathy has confirmed that it is indeed her father in the viral clip.
"The man seen in the viral video is my father and yoga guru BKS Iyengar. The video was recorded in 1938 in Pune by Dr VB Gokhale, a surgeon from Belgaum. In the 1970s, Gokhale's family brought the film to my father as they happened to find it while cleaning the house," Parthasarathy told India Today.
Thus, we hereby conclude that old footage of yoga teacher BKS Iyengar, who is also regarded as the founder of the yoga style "Iyengar Yoga", is being falsely circulated as PM Modi performing asanas.
