FAKE: Pritish Nandy tweets picture of Sardar Patel’s old statue, claims Statue of Unity has a Chinese-looking Patel

CLAIM
Photo of an old statue of Sardar Vallabhai Patel was tweeted by former Rajya Sabha MP Pritish Nandy on Sunday to claim that recently inaugurated Statue of Unity got Patel’s face wrong.
In his tweet, Nandy pointed out how nobody paid any attention to the face of Patel in the statue as it was too tall. He claimed that the face used in the statue had “no resemblance to the real man”.

The text in the post claimed that Patel’s statue is made in “Chinese style” and this is what happens when “Chinese men work on such projects”.
Nandy’s tweet has gotten over 1,000 retweets and 3,000 likes.
TRUTH
The photo tweeted by Nandy is 10-year-old. It belongs to a statue installed at Gandhinagar in Gujarat and NOT the Statue of Unity.
METHODOLOGY
Using reverse-image search, source of the photo used by Nandy could be zeroed in to stock image site Getty.
The original photo was taken on October 31, 2008. The photo is of a bronze statue of Patel installed in Gandhinagar. This statue was built by internationally-renowned Indian sculptor Jashuben Shilpi.
The photo was captured by AFP photographer Sam Panthaky, while Shilpi was giving finishing touches to the statue.

Interestingly, even after being called out by many Twitter users for spreading incorrect photo, Nandy refused to take his tweet down and argued that he was factually correct.

In his defense, Nandy claimed that news magazine The Outlook’s latest edition carried the same picture.

VERIFICATION
To verify if The Outlook carried same photograph, we went through their website. In an article titled ‘How Is The Fake News Factory Structured?’, the magazine published the photo claiming it to be screenshot of one of the fake posts about the Statue of Unity that went viral during its inauguration.
The caption of The Outlook’s photo read “After Congress president Rahul Gandhi said the recently-unveiled statue of Sardar Patel was made in China, Congressmen circulated a photograph of an old statue of the freedom fighter erected in 2008.”

Clearly, The Outlook used the photo to talk about how fake news is propagated on social media.
The Outlook pointed out how social media team of Congress and its leaders were hand-in-glove in spreading the old photo to create a fake narrative about Statue of Unity being built in China.
Vinay Kumar Dokania, Youth Congress’ social media team coordinator, made the claim on Twitter, saying that the Statue of Unity was “sanghified (sic) statue of Patel” made in “Chinese style”.

VERDICT
Times Fact Check has found Pritish Nandy used photo of an old statue of Sardar Patel with a misleading claim that the face of Patel on the Statue of Unity has Chinese features.