Several social media handles, including the official X account of Kerala Congress, claimed on Thursday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh have been inducted into the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Margdarshak Mandal.

The Kerala Congress also shared a screenshot from the BJP’s website featuring the names and photos of PM Modi and Singh alongside BJP veterans Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi in the Margdarshak Mandal.

In a post on X, Kerala Congress took a dig, stating, “Modi and Rajnath Singh officially entered Marg Darshak Mandal according to BJP’s website. Is this indication that the floor test is going to fail and is this a dry run of the page post the disaster?”

However, here’s a fact check.

A 2014 press release on the BJP’s website reveals that the then party president Amit Shah had already named Narendra Modi, Rajnath Singh, LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as members of the Margdarshak Mandal.

Last week, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister for a third term, alongside 71 other Union Ministers, whereas Rajnath Singh became the Defence Minister for the second consecutive term.

PM Modi and Singh are also part of the BJP Parliamentary Board, along with JP Nadda, Amit Shah, BS Yediyurappa, Sarbananda Sonowal, Dr K Laxman, Iqbal Singh Lalpura, Sudha Yadav, and Dr Satyanarayana.

In 2014, when BJP veterans LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were elevated to the newly formed Margdarshak Mandal, questions arose regarding its functionality—whether it would serve a symbolic purpose to accommodate veterans and mitigate potential humiliation of a direct ouster.

“Every political party goes through a transition. Now new blood is coming into the party leadership. The role of the Margdarshak Mandal will be more advisory in nature and it will be a moral guiding force in the BJP. It won’t have any constitutional role,” BJP’s GVLN Rao had then said about the mandal.