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1967 photo of Australian go-go dancers falsely shared to attack Sonia Gandhi

A post by an X user named Sonali (@Sonalimumbai1), who describes herself as a BJP leader and is followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the platform, went viral last week. The post carries a somewhat blurred black and white image of a group of women dancing atop a table in what seems to be hotel. Sonali implied that one of these women is Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.

The image, posted on August 14, has more than 353,800 views till date. (Archive)

The post came shortly after Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on August 14 mocked at the BJP government’s foreign policy and took a jibe at PM Modi’s customary hugs with international leaders.

The remarks triggered immediate backlash from the BJP and its supporters. As a part of that, X user Sonali, posted a video of Indira Gandhi hugging former President of Cuba Fidel Castro. The caption read, (translated from Marathi), “Whenever Rahul talks nonsense, all the misdeeds of his family come out in the open. Now watch this video. In this, Indira Gandhi is hugging Fidel Castro of Cuba. I don’t think anything there is wrong with it. What will the son of a bar dancer say about this? Now what do the sycophants of Congress have to say about this?”

After an X user responded to Sonali’s post with derogatory comments, she countered it with the aforementioned image with the caption: “That’s what people who drink bar dancer’s urine would say.”

Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of the image, which was bearing the watermark of Getty Images, we ran a reverse image search on Google. This search led us to the archive of Getty Images, where a clearer version of the same image is available. The caption of this image reads: “Go Go dancing girls help break the beer drought on Rawson Hotel in Auburn on 21 November 1967.”

The image comprises three dancing women. If one zooms in on the image, it becomes clear that none of these women is Sonia Gandhi.

Upon further investigation, we came across a Facebook page named ‘I Grew Up in Mortdale 2223’. On November 17, 2025, the page posted the same image with the caption: “#OnThisDay 17 November 1967, a strike by more than 2000 brewery workers in Sydney led to what was to be known as the “Draught Beer Drought”. When, after 14 days of negotiations, the workers voted to return to work, a group of go-go dancers helped patrons to celebrate at the Rawson Hotel in Auburn. [Photo by Vic Sumner » Fairfax Archives]

This news was also featured on the November 15, 1967, edition of The Canberra Times of Australia.

According to publicly available information, Sonia Gandhi studied at Bell Education Trust, Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1964, where she met and married Rajiv Gandhi in 1968. During her studies, she worked as a part time server at a local restaurant in Cambridge. There is no official record mentioning that she moved to Australia in that time period.

Thus, it can be conclusively stated that an image from 1967 of go-go dancers in Australia was shared by X user Sonali to falsely claim that one of those women was Sonia Gandhi.

Sharing unrelated images to attack the Congress leader is not a new trend. Alt News published a fact-check on March 25, 2019, debunking a similar claim. At the time, BJP supporters circulated an image of actress Ursula Andress from the James Bond film Dr No, falsely claiming that it showed Sonia Gandhi in an “inappropriate” dress.

 


This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Anindya Hazra.