Fact Check: Postal stamp of PM Modi issued by Turkey in 2015 going viral with misleading claim

New Delhi (Vishvas News): Following the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, which killed over 50,000 people in both countries, many countries including India came forward to help the two nations in their time of distress. India had also sent a team of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) for the search and rescue operations in Turkey under ‘Operation Dost’. Following this, a postal stamp in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going viral on the internet. Social media users are claiming that Turkey has issued PM Modi’s stamp after India helped the nation in earthquake relief work.

Vishvas News investigated the claim and found that Turkey had issued postal stamps in the name of representatives of all the countries participating in the G-20 summit which was held in 2015 in Turkey. At that time, a stamp was also issued in the name of the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. That stamp is now being shared with a misleading claim.

Claim:

Facebook user ‘Ram Bihari Gupta‘ (archive link) shared this stamp on March 2, with the caption, “The Muslim nation Turkey has issued a postal stamp on Chowkidar Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi and we do not have time from abusing him and shout thief-thief.”

Investigation:

To investigate the viral claim, we first did an open search on Google with related keywords. We found a news report published by Business Today on March 19, 2015. According to the news quoted by PTI, “Turkey has issued a postage stamp of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to commemorate the recently concluded G-20 summit. There is a picture of PM Modi and the Indian national flag on the postage stamp of 2.80 Turkish lira. In this, ‘Narendra Modi-Prime Minister of India Republic’ is written at the bottom.”

“The official Twitter handle of the G-20 Turkish Summit Leaders’ Summit tweeted that in memory of the summit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has issued personalized postage stamps of the leaders involved. A total of 33 stamps have been issued featuring leaders from 19 of the world’s largest and most powerful economies and the European Union. PM Modi participated in the summit in Turkey on 15 and 16 November. Other leaders include US President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council. Although French President François Hollande canceled his visit to the summit due to the killings in Paris, a stamp was issued in his honour.”

A similar news report was also published in the Economic Times on November 18, 2015. According to the report, “Turkey has issued a personalized postage stamp with the picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to commemorate the recently concluded G-20 leaders’ summit. The postage stamp of 2.80 Turkish Lira has the picture of PM Modi and the Indian national flag. A total of 33 postage stamps have been issued.”

The official Twitter handle of the G-20 Turkey tweeted on November 18, 2015, “President Erdogan presented a special edition stamp collection of all leaders attending the G-20 Summit in Antalya.”

A link to Flickr.com is also given in it. A picture of the collection of these stamps is available on Flickr. In the picture, the ticket issued in the name of PM Modi can also be seen.

For further confirmation, we reached out to Turkey’s fact-checking organization Teyit via Twitter. It said, “This is a picture of the G-20 summit held in Turkey in 2015. A postage stamp was issued for all the leaders who participated in the summit”.

We scanned the profile of Facebook user ‘Ram Bihari Gupta‘ who shared the old stamp. According to the information, Ram Bihari Gupta lives in Kanpur and has 4,953 friends on Facebook and is driven by an ideology.