Fact Check: Morphed newspaper article falsely quotes Modi saying Muslims had to be killed to gain trust of Hindus

The clipping carries two headlines in Hindi which translate to 'Ram mandir will never be made: Amit Shah' and 'Muslims, farmers had to be killed to gain trust of Hindus: Narendra Modi'.

A text that accompanies the news clippings read, "Found this copy of a newspaper with great difficulty. Modi government had made it disappear."

Click here and here to view these claims.

Fact Check:

NewsMeter found that the newspaper clipping has been morphed to ascribe false quotes to PM Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

We performed a reverse image search and found a fact-check report by BBC Hindi which had debunked the image in 2018. The report carries another newspaper clipping with headlines on Samajwadi Party leaders Akhilesh Yadav and Mulayam Singh instead of Shah and PM Modi.

A comparison of the two clippings show that the design of the two is the same and that the texts in the Shah-Modi clipping are bigger and some text such as "संतो को मोहरा बना रही है भाजपा: सपा", "न्यूज़ चैनल झूठे, प्रिंट मीडिया ठीक", and "अमर उजाला ब्यूरो" are visible in both the clippings.

A keyword search of the second headline "Mulayam: To win the trust of Muslims, it was necessary to fire on Hindus" led to a similar headline in an Amar Ujala article dated 7 February 2014. The headline of the article reads, "गोली नहीं चलवाता तो मुसलिमों का भरोसा टूट जाता" (Translation: "If bullets weren't fired, the trust of the Muslims would have been broken"), which is similar to the one in the newspaper clipping.

Evidently, a newspaper clipping has been morphed to ascribe false quotes to PM Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.