Fact Check: BJP MP Manoj Tiwari Didn’t Concede To Kanhaiya Kumar Before Polls

A viral video featuring BJP MP and actor Manoj Tiwari is circulating on social media claiming that the leader has already conceded defeat against the Congress candidate even as his constituency is yet to vote.

The video features a Hindi text overlay that translates to: “Manoj Tiwari has accepted defeat.”

In the 11-second clip, Mr Tiwari, speaking to a journalist in a moving car, says, “Look, I was aware of my defeat, but the sad thing was that I had been winning for a long time, and then I felt like I was about to lose (translated from Hindi).”

On X, the video was shared with captions that read: “The dancer accepted defeat even before the elections. How will the BJP cross 400 (seats) like this? Kanhaiya Kumar is amazing.”

One such post has amassed over 39,000 views at the time of writing. Archived versions of these posts can be found here and here.

Manoj Tiwari is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from the North East Delhi constituency, which he currently represents as a Member of Parliament. The constituency will vote on May 25, when Mr Tiwari will face Kanhaiya Kumar, a Congress leader and former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, among other candidates.

However, a clip of Manoj Tiwari talking about his unsuccessful 2009 contest has been misinterpreted to claim he has purportedly accepted defeat against Mr Kumar in the ongoing polls.

What Did We Find?

Upon spotting the ‘Jist’ watermark in the viral video, we tracked its extended version on the Jist YouTube channel. This video (archived here) was uploaded on March 31. The video, titled “I Spent A Day With Manoj Tiwari To Discuss Pyar, Cricket, Rahul Gandhi, Modi & Kejriwal | Part-1,” runs for about an hour and 11 minutes. The viral segment appears between the 34:04 mark and the 34:14 timestamps.

The video is of Mr Tiwari interacting with a journalist, and around the 28-minute mark in this clip, Mr Tiwari delves into the 2009 general elections. He mentions that he was initially unaffiliated with any party and even campaigned for money for his now-rival Congress in Lucknow. He recounts how Amar Singh, a politician who served as the general secretary of the Samajwadi Party (SP), brought him into his party.

Around the 31:10 mark, Mr Tiwari says that despite his initial hesitation, he agreed to contest the election as an SP candidate after being urged by Amar Singh at a gathering that included actor Amitabh Bachchan and businessman Anil Ambani.

Further, he recalls his hesitance to contest the 2009 elections against BJP leader Yogi Adityanath in Gorakhpur due to his past affiliation with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP. He also narrates an incident where he fled to Mumbai during the campaign to evade facing Yogi Adityanath and the fear of his inevitable defeat, only to be caught and forced to return.

Then, around the 34:04 mark, Mr Tiwari says, “Look, I was aware of my defeat. But the sad thing was that I had been winning for a long time. I felt like I was about to lose.”

He then says, “But even in that defeat, there was a victory because of Yogi Adityanath, who stood for Hindu culture, civilization, and Sanatan culture… We didn’t know that Narendra Modi would become the country’s Prime Minister at the time. I’m talking about 2009. In 2009, you could see there was a situation of complete political instability throughout the country.”

This bit, where it is clear that he was referring to the 2009 elections, has been omitted from the viral clip to make it appear that he conceded defeat in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

2009 General Elections

Manoj Tiwari began his political career in Gorakhpur in 2009 when he ran as a Samajwadi Party candidate. He contested against Yogi Adityanath – now the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who had consistently represented Gorakhpur in Parliament since 1998, as reported by NDTV.

However, Mr Tiwari was unsuccessful in his Parliament bid at the time, securing only around 83,000 votes. Yogi Adityanath had polled over four lakh votes, and Bahujan Samaj Party’s Vinay Shankar Tiwari got 1.82 lakh votes. Mr Tiwari first won the Lok Sabha election in 2014 after he joined the BJP.

The Verdict

In the original video, Mr Tiwari discusses the 2009 general elections, which he had contested against Yogi Adityanath in Gorakhpur. This segment has been cropped and shared out of context to claim that he has already conceded defeat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.