A few photos of former Indian cricket-team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni sitting at a petrol filling station are being circulated on social media platforms with a claim that he joined the Bharat bandh organised yesterday in protest against rising petrol prices.
The news was peddled on social media platform Twitter. One such tweet spreading this false claim also attributed a fake quote to Dhoni. The tweet quotes Dhoni as saying, "I stopped playing the helicopter shot because I couldn't afford petrol at Rs 90/litre"
Arun Thakur, who has "Social media HPCC" written in his bio, tweeted three photos of MS Dhoni sitting at the petrol filling station with the fake quote mentioned above attributed to Dhoni, in Hindi. He deleted the tweet later.
Priyanka Chaturvedi, National Spokesperon of Congress, had retweeted this tweet from Thakur. Now that Thakur has deleted the tweet, the retweet has vanished from Chaturvedi's Twitter field as well.Twitter user @inavaneet tweeted about this.
Fake pic shared by official spokesperson of @INCIndia party Ms @priyankac19 on #BharatBandh . pic.twitter.com/uAnoX9LXsJ
— Navneet Sharma ���� (@Inavaneet) September 10, 2018
Reality - MS Dhoni never participated in any bandh or protest of any kind. The image that has been peddled as the proof of his participation, was actually taken at at a Hindustan Petroleum pump in Himachal Pradesh's Shimla this August. Dhoni along with Sakshi and his hair stylist Sapna Bhavnani had visited Himachal for an ad shoot.
A simple reverse image search with the image revealed the truth. Bhavnani had retweeted a fan page's image of MS Dhoni, Sakshi and her sitting at the petrol pump during the shoot. Confirming that the photo was not taken on September 10, Bhavnani said to TOI, "Yes, this photo was clicked on August 29 in Shimla. We had travelled to Shimla for an ad shoot."
