Gagan Thapa Promised Free Mobile Phones For People Over 18? No, Viral Video Is Misleading

Claim
Nepali Congress President Gagan Kumar Thapa promised free mobile phones for people aged 18 and Rs 30k allowance for people over 60.
Fact
Viral video is clipped and shared without context.

A video allegedly showing Nepali Congress President Gagan Thapa promising that he will hand out free mobile phones to people who have reached 18 years and a monthly allowance of Rs 30k to people aged over 60 is going viral on TikTok.

The Nepali Congress has declared party president Gagan Thapa as its prime ministerial candidate for the March 5 parliamentary elections.  A special convention of the Nepali Congress, held in mid-January, elected Thapa as the party President. The convention was boycotted by the faction led by former president Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Against this backdrop, TikTok user @next_gen997 posted a video showing Nepali Congress President Gagan Thapa delivering a speech. In his speech, Thapa says, “I am elected as the prime minister, I will make the following decisions: Make arrangement for giving an allowance of Rs 30,000 to people above 60 years of age; everyone who has reached 18 will get a free mobile phone—and there will be a choice between I-phone and Samsung brands. And people riding motorbikes will get 100 liters of free petrol in a year.” The video also contains two other unrelated clips making a mockery of Thapa’s speech.

The video posted on February 22 has garnered 1135 likes, 25 users have commented and 325 people have shared it until the count.

Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.

Fact Check /Verification

To check the veracity of the claim, Newschecker split the video into several key frames and ran reverse searches on them. The search results threw up several videos (See here, and here) resembling the viral speech of Gagan Thapa posted on several platforms on different dates.

We checked a 3:33-minute long video, dated August 7, 2022, posted on the YouTube channel of Scot Nepal. We noticed that the video bore close resemblance to the frames from the viral video including the stage, Gagan Thapa’s dress and the background picture. Though we didn’t find the clip containing Thapa’s viral speech in the video, we found some clues from the banner displayed in the background. The banner read that the event was organised by Nepali Congress Madi Rural Municipality at Shitaladevi Party Palace in Pokhara, on March 4 and 5 of 2022.

By using the available clues, we found a video, dated March 4, 2022, posted on the Facebook page of Samadhan News. On checking the 1 hour 3 minute video, we found that the clip from 45:50-minute to 46:12-minute exactly matched the viral video.  In the original video, Thapa goes on to say, “Who else can beat me in terms of popularity? I’ll give it to everyone. It will all be free. I will get a lot of applause. But nobody asks me the source of the treasury. “

Further, we found another video, dated March 5, 2022, posted on the Facebook page named Hamrakhabar.  The video caption clarified that Gagan Thapa’s detractors posted a clipped video, misleading the people about Gagan Thapa’s speech and that the video gives the context of his speech.

The longer version video clearly provides the context to the viral clip in which Thapa actually noted that he can be the most popular leader by announcing such populist decisions. Hinting at the culture of taking credits for government populist schemes—that are often not questioned by the people, Thapa was underlining the need to strengthen the state coffers and economic resources. Thus, our findings clearly showed that the viral video from March 2022 is clipped and shared ahead of the elections in a misleading manner.

Thus, our findings clearly showed that the viral video from March 2022 is clipped and shared ahead of the elections in a misleading manner.

Conclusion

No, Nepali Congress President Gagan Thapa hasn’t promised to give free mobile phones, Rs 30k allowance to people above 60 and free petrol to riders aged over 18. The viral video is clipped from his old speech in which Thapa was actually referring to the competition among parties to announce populist programmes and the difficulties in supporting them financially.

Result: Missing Context

Sources
Scott Nepal /YouTube , August 7, 2022
Hamrakhabar /Facebook, March 5, 2022
Samadhan News /Facebook, March 4, 2022