VERDICT: FALSE
The man in the viral photo is Saddamhusen Makarani — an Indian citizen from Gujarat who has lived in the UK for six years. His original 2021 photo shows him holding a smartphone, not a Pakistani flag. The flag was added with AI tools.
The claim
On 18 October 2026, the official X and Instagram accounts of BJP Delhi — the Bharatiya Janata Party’s unit in India’s capital — posted a set of images about a protest in London the previous day. The caption, in Hindi, claimed that opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal had “called their gang” to gather people in London to “defame India” during a demonstration linked to YouTuber Dhruv Rathee.
One of the images showed a man in an orange jacket holding Pakistan’s green-and-white national flag. The posts identified him as “Saddam Hussain,” a Pakistani, presented as evidence that a Pakistani national had turned up to support Rathee’s protest. Popular creators Abhi and Niyu shared the image as well. Within hours, the claim had spread across X, Instagram and Threads, racking up tens of thousands of reactions.
The context, to be clear: a real protest did take place. Rathee, a high-profile Indian political commentator, led an anti-SIR demonstration — against the Election Commission’s controversial voter-roll revision — near Westminster in London on 17 October. The question is only whether a Pakistani man holding Pakistan’s flag was there with him.
The facts
1. The man in the photo is Indian, and he says so himself. The man is Saddamhusen Makarani, who posts on Instagram as @saddyjordan. In direct-to-camera video statements made as the claim went viral, Makarani stated that he is an Indian citizen, originally from Gujarat — the home state of India’s prime minister — and that he has lived in the United Kingdom for six years. In one statement he held up his Indian passport on camera. His Instagram bio reads, “Indian by blood.” Watch his statement here.
2. The original photograph is from 2021, and there is no flag in it. The image used to build the viral claim is a mirror selfie Makarani posted in August 2021 — five years before the London protest. In the original, he is holding a smartphone, not a flag. Rathee himself called this out on X on 18 October: “Charanvandana couple spreading fake news once again. Do you get orders from BJP directly to defame Indian citizens like this?”
3. The flag was added by AI. Independent fact-checkers who examined the viral image reached the same conclusion. AI detectors rated it as near-certainly machine-generated — Hive Moderation put it at 99.9% likely AI-generated, and SynthID watermark analysis indicated the content had been generated or edited with OpenAI’s tools. A second viral image from the same batch — showing protesters draped in Bangladeshi flags being interviewed — carries a visible Gemini AI watermark in its corner and distorted, gibberish text on placards in the background, classic tells of AI generation.
4. The claim collapses under its own timeline. A 2021 mirror selfie from a man living in Britain cannot be evidence of who attended a 2026 protest in London — and the man himself is not Pakistani at all. The photo’s entire evidentiary chain, from identity to flag to protest, is fabricated.
Verdict
FALSE. The viral image does not show a Pakistani man holding Pakistan’s flag at Dhruv Rathee’s London protest. It shows Saddamhusen Makarani, an Indian citizen, in a 2021 selfie — with a smartphone where the image’s editors put a Pakistani flag using AI tools. This is the same AI-morphing playbook behind other fabrications we have exposed, including the AI deepfake that put a false medical endorsement in a Nigerian footballer’s mouth and the fake viral videos of iPhones floating in the Strait of Hormuz.
Why it matters
The tools to rewrite reality now fit in a phone. Take a five-year-old selfie, replace the smartphone with a foreign flag, rename the man in it — and you have “evidence” that an Indian citizen is a Pakistani interfering in Indian politics. In a region where India-Pakistan sentiment runs white-hot, that kind of fabrication does not just embarrass the people who share it; it can inflame real cross-border tensions and force an ordinary person to hold his passport up to a camera just to prove who he is. When a political party’s official account shares AI-edited images without a single check, the message to everyone else is that verification is optional — and that is exactly how misinformation wins.
