Fact Check: Rahul Gandhi’s popularity didn’t surpass that of PM Modi after Bharat Jodo Yatra

New Delhi, Sep 29: Rahul Gandhi recently embarked upon his Bharat Jodo Yatra amidst an ongoing crisis within his party ahead of the Congress party presidential elections.

Now many have said that the Yatra has catapulted Rahul Gandhi's social media popularity so much that it has surpassed that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A news channel put out a graph and the anchor can be seen explaining the same which goes by the headline, Sentiment comparison of key individuals and positive sentiments across Twitter.

The bar graph places Rahul Gandhi on top with 66 per cent while PM Modi stood at second with 15 per cent. Mamata Banerjee and Akhilesh Yadav at 7 and 5 per cent while Arvind Kejriwal is 4 per cent.

One user took a screen grab of the news bulletin and tweeted, 'blazing his way across the ratings chart and only two states have been covered so far by Shri Rahul Gandhi. 3,500 kilometres will reduce the paltry 15 per cent to a single digit.'

OneIndia has learnt that this graph is an old one. There are many tweets that claimed that this graph is from 2017 when elections were held in the state of Gujarat.

We also stumbled upon the actual report from which this screenshot was taken. It was shared on YouTube by Times Now on December 17 2017.

If one looks at the video the channel did not have the photographs of Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal. Instead it featured former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, now-BJP leader Hard Patel and independent MLA Jignesh Mevani. While the popularity of Rahul Gandhi had in fact surpassed that of PM Modi, it must be noted that the BJP subsequently went on to win the elections.

If one looks at the Twitter accounts of both Rahul Gandhi and PM Modi since the Bharat Jodo Yatra the latter is still doing better. While Rahul Gandhi's follower count increased by 1.61 lakh over the past 30 days, PM Modi's increased by 9.18 lakh.

Hence it can be concluded that the claim that Rahul Gandhi surpassed PM Modi's popularity on Twitter since the Bharat Jodo Yatra began is fake.