A manipulated image appearing to show India’s opposition Congress leader Rahul Gandhi sitting with controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik — a wanted man in India — has surfaced in social media posts alleging the pair met during Gandhi’s September vacation in Malaysia. The original photo shows Naik meeting religious officials in Oman in 2023.<\/p>\n
The image of Gandhi sitting next to Naik and another man was shared on Facebook<\/a> on September 12, 2025.<\/p>\n “Rahul Gandhi met anti-India terrorist Zakir Naik in Malaysia,” reads part of its Hindi-language caption.<\/p>\n The post surfaced after Gandhi was targeted by members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for taking a holiday<\/a> in Malaysia’s Langkawi in the middle of campaigning for local elections in Bihar in early September (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n Screenshot of the false post captured September 20, 2025, with a red X added by AFP <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The purported image of Gandhi and Naik in Malaysia also surfaced elsewhere on\u00a0Facebook<\/a> <\/span>and\u00a0X<\/a>.<\/p>\n Naik, a radical television preacher who has called the 9\/11 attacks an “inside job”, left India in 2016 and\u00a0moved<\/a> to largely Muslim Malaysia, where he was granted permanent residency (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n He is wanted in India for money laundering and terror-related activities, while his Islamic Research Foundation was declared “unlawful” and banned<\/a> in the country (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n However, the circulating image has been digitally manipulated — it also bears a watermark reading “ChatGPT” in the bottom-right corner, suggesting it was edited using the AI tool.<\/p>\n A Google\u00a0reverse image search<\/span><\/a> found the unaltered photo in a post on a Facebook page called Arabian Daily<\/span><\/a> on March 23, 2023 (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n The post is captioned, “In pictures: Dr Zakir Naik Interactions with His Eminence Sheikh Ahmad Al Khalili, Grand Mufti of the Sultanate of Oman, Dr Mohammed Al Maamari Minister of Endowments and Religious Affairs, and Assistant Mufti Sheikh Kahlan Al Kharousi.”<\/p>\n