Fact Check: Old picture of Sharad Pawar and Eknath Shinde meeting is being shared as recent

New Delhi (Vishwas Team): A picture of Sharad Pawar and Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde is doing rounds on social media. It is being claimed that Eknath Shinde had arrived with flowers to meet Sharad Pawar. The viral claim turned out to be misleading in the investigation of Vishvas News. The viral picture is from November 2021. At that time Eknath Shinde was a minister in the coalition government in Maharashtra and worked with the NCP. An old picture of Pawar and Shinde meeting is going viral with the wrong claim.

Claim :

Facebook user Prith Singh shared this picture and wrote, “This is Pawar power! Shinde sahib, who told Uddhav Thackeray to break the alliance with NCP.”

The archive link of the post can be seen here.

Investigation:

We searched the viral picture with the help of Google reverse image search. We found the viral picture on the official Twitter handle of NCP. It was uploaded on 11 November 2021. Caption reads, “State Urban Development Minister Eknath Shinde met Sharad Pawar at his Mumbai residence.”

Eknath Shinde shared this picture on official Twitter account on 6th July 2022, and clarified that this picture is old. Shinde wrote in Marathi, “A photo of me with NCP National President Sharad Pawar is going viral at the moment.No such meeting was held. Please don’t believe these rumors. This photo is old.”

For more information, we reached out to Senior Reporter Samiullah Khan of Mid-Day. He told us, “The viral claim is false. This picture is very old. The two have not met recently. This picture is about six-seven months old and is from the time when Eknath Shinde was a minister in the coalition government in Maharashtra and worked with the NCP.”

At the end of the investigation, we scanned the account of the Facebook user Prith Singh who shared the claim. From scanning, we came to know that the user has about 44 friends on Facebook. The user is influenced by an ideology.