An old photo of a broken statue of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore and a separate video of its installation have gone viral on social media with a misleading claim that it shows a mob destroying Tagore's statue during the ongoing violence in Bangladesh.
The visuals have surfaced on the date of Tagore's death anniversary, observed in both Bangladesh and West Bengal. BOOM found that the visuals are from 2023, showing the installation and subsequent disappearance of a Tagore sculpture constructed by Dhaka University students. The sculpture was later reinstalled near the Raju Memorial Sculpture in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The visuals are circulating alongside images of the vandalised statues of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh's founding father and first president. The situation in Bangladesh has been chaotic after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on August 5, 2024, following a prolonged protest against her Awami League-led government's quota system. News reports state that over 400 people have lost their lives in the ongoing violence in the country.
West Bengal BJP leader Dr. Anirban Ganguly posted the picture with a caption, "Desecrated & decapitated - the composer of Bangladesh’s national anthem! Homage to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore on his death anniversary today…."
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
Tarunjyoti Tewari, Vice President of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) in West Bengal, shared a video of a crowd around a Tagore statue, captioning it in Bengali, "Did you expect anything more from Bangladesh on the death anniversary of poet Rabindranath Tagore? Shame... They claim to be Bengalis again."
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
Both the visuals (photo and the video) are circulating on Facebook and are being linked to the recent violence in Bangladesh.
Fact Check
BOOM found that neither the photo nor the video of the Tagore statue is connected to the current turmoil in Bangladesh.
We noticed that the incident occurred in 2023 when a statue of Rabindranath Tagore went missing from the Dhaka University campus. The remnants of the sculpture were later reinstalled by students in Dhaka.
Tagore Statue: Disappearance and Reappearance
A reverse image search on the viral photo led us to a 2023 article from the Bangladeshi news outlet Prothom Alo, which featured the same photo and a report on the incident.
The outlet on February 17, 2023 reported that the photograph shows the head of Rabindranath Tagore's missing sculpture; it was later recovered from Suhrawardy Udyan in the TSC area of Dhaka University.
We then ran a related keyword search and found that several Bangladeshi outlets reported on the incident at the time.
A Dhaka Tribune report from February 17, 2023, stated that on February 16, Dhaka University (DU) authorities removed a statue of Rabindranath Tagore, which had been installed by students next to the Raju Memorial Sculpture.
The report quoted DU Proctor Professor Dr AKM Golam Rabbani as saying, “The institution has a policy on placing sculptures on the university premises. The sculpture was placed without informing the university administration. Therefore, the university administration removed it”.
We also found a Prothom Alo video report from February 16, 2023, featuring the same visuals as those in the now-viral video. However, the report included a statement from Shimul Kumbhkaar, president of a Chhatra Union faction and a student in the sculpture faculty of DU, who was at the forefront of the initiative.
In the report, Kumbhkaar is heard complaining that they found out the Rabindranath statue had disappeared on the morning of February 16, 2023, and had no information on its whereabouts. He also added that the statue was installed as a protest against the censorship of freedom of expression in the country.
We also observed that the report includes visuals of the Tagore sculpture installation by Dhaka University students on the evening of February 14, 2023, as mentioned by Kumbhkaar before it disappeared.
On February 18, 2023, the Dhaka Tribune reported that students had reconstructed the sculpture after finding its parts scattered across the campus.
An excerpt from the report states, "The DU students found several parts of the sculpture around the campus and managed to build it again next to the Raju Memorial Sculpture. However, this time, the sculpture is different. After the disappearance of the sculpture, aggrieved DU students displayed a banner that read: “Gum Hoye Gechen Rabindranath” (Rabindranath has disappeared), where the sculpture was built."