By Sachin Baghel
A doctored commercial of Disney Plus Hotstar featuring actor Kartik Aaryan is circulating with false claims that the actor has batted for Congress leader Kamal Nath ahead of the legislative assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh.
The digitally altered clip shows Aaryan stopping at an airport in the hope that his fans will take photographs with him.
The altered video supposedly shows passengers at an airport being awestruck by a billboard while ignoring the actor. The fake clip includes the Congress logo, a voice over describing proposed schemes of the party in Madhya Pradesh, and a fake billboard with Congress leader Kamal Nath on it. The advertisement claims that the party under Kamal Nath will provide two lakh government jobs and a loan of Rs 50,000 for starting a business. It further claims that bus services will be free for women, gas cylinder services will be worth Rs 500 and women will be given Rs 1500 per month. The advertisement further describes schemes providing free electricity, WiFi and higher education loans.
Aaryan in the video later says that he is also a Congressi as the free schemes are further detailed in the advertisement.
Legislative Assembly elections are going to be held in November in five states of the country including Madhya Pradesh. Voting will be held in Madhya Pradesh on November 17 and the results will be declared on December 3. Due to this, several parties are vigorously engaged in election campaign.
Several doctored videos have been shared in the run-up to elections in the state. Read our coverage here.
The video is circulating with the caption, "Bollywood actor Karthik Aaryan has extended his support to Congress and Kamal Nath ji in the Madhya Pradesh assembly elections." (Original text in Hindi: बॉलीवुड अभिनेता कार्तिक आर्यन ने मध्य प्रदेश विधानसभा चुनाव में कांग्रेस और कमलनाथ जी को अपना समर्थन दिया.")
The video is also circulating on X (formerly known as Twitter) with the same claim.
Fact Check
BOOM first ran a related keyword search to check if Kartik Aaryan has featured in any of the Congress advertisements. We were however unable to find any such video featuring Aaryan. We then broke the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search with one of the keyframes from the video. We found the original video on Aaryan's Instagram account uploaded on September 23, 2023. The video has been captioned as, "So, this happened... Jab #DisneyPlusHotstar dega itna sab FREE ka, baaki sab toh padega hi feeka. Watch ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup aur kayi hit movies aur web series for free!."
The original video is an advertisement of Disney Plus Hotstar.
The same original advertisement can be found on Disney Plus Hotstar's YouTube channel. In the advertisement Aaryan promotes the special features of Disney Plus Hotstar with respect to the broadcasting of ICC Men's Cricket World Cup 2023 matches.
We also found Aaryan's X handle from where he has debunked the advertisement featuring Congress logo and content.
