Addressing an election rally in Karnataka’s Udupi, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president JP Nadda claimed that the Prime Minister had stoked the Russia-Ukraine war to bring Indian students back to India.
The official Twitter account of BJP posted a tweet supporting his claim, saying “No other Prime Minister in the history of India has been as great as Modi Ji. He stopped Russia-Ukraine War to evacuate 22,500 students from there back to India. Many of them were from Karnataka.”
Fact Check
In relation to this, we found a video on youtube of a press conference held by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). In the video, MEA’s spokesperson, Arindham Bagchi, can be heard saying that “So I don’t know exactly what exact role as I said, and that brings me I think, what Suhasini was asking the first question, look, I don’t know if I can add anything more, we got this specific inputs that look this is the route that’s available, these are the places that Indian citizens should go by this time. We conveyed that to our citizens and I’m happy that many could make it not in the best of circumstances, perhaps because I think there were sporadic incidents of violence, but this is a warzone and I can’t comment on the exact details. We haven’t met them yet. But I’m happy that a significant number of people could come out through that route and through whatever trains. So I think that’s the kind of conversation but extrapolating that to say that somebody’s holding a bombing, or that, you know, this is something where we are coordinating that I think is absolutely inaccurate, if I could be (inaudible), then it’ll extrapolate itself. So we would then order the resumption of bombing. I think that’s really getting a bit much ahead of ourselves.”
Conclusion
From DFRAC’s fact check, it’s clear that BJP’s national President JP Nadda’s claim of PM Modi stopping the Russia-Ukraine war in order to repatriate 22,500 Indian students is fake, as the Ministry of External Affairs has already refuted this claim.
