An old video of a group of people burning photos of Hindu gods at a protest has has been revived with misleading claims. Captions shared with the video on Twitter and Facebook falsely claim that it shows anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters burning the photos.
Twitter user Dr. Jayasree Nair (@jayasreenair1) shared the video with the following caption:
"Shocking! How dare these fools burn the photos of Hindu Gods & Goddesses in the name of CAA protest? What the hell CAA has to do with Hindus? Their agenda is different & politicians of @INCIndia & @cpimspeak are nurturing this. @PMOIndia @rashtrapatibhvn @VPSecretariat @AmitShah"
Screenshot of Nair's tweet. Click here for an archived version.
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Nair's tweet was further shared by BJP National Spokesperson Sambit Patra.
Screenshot of Patra's tweet. Click here for an archived version.
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Fact Check
BOOM did a relevant text search, which took us to a longer version of the same video on YouTube. It was uploaded on September 3, 2018, with the title "Bhim army activists disrespect Hindu gods".
Upon searching further, we found longer versions of the same video on Facebook as well, also uploaded around in August 2018. The caption of the one of the video says, "Young Ambedkarites burning potraits of Hindu Gods in Ashokpuram MYSORE to protest against Sanghis who burned copies of the Constitution." Slogans in Kannada can be heard in the video.
Full View
By comparing keyframes of the viral video and the one above, we were able to ascertain that they are indeed the same.
Left: Screenshot of the viral video shared by Nair. Right: Screenshot of the Facebook video from 2018.
Another post containing this video was shared with the caption,"Karnataka Police Yedurappa I hope you have taken action on this people ,specially Buddhist anti social people in mame of Ambedkar how can they do this kind of hatred and crime against hindus.."
BOOM could not independently verify the authenticity of the captions in the YouTube and Facebook videos. However, the video is more than a year old and therefore cannot be related to the recent wave of anti-CAA protests around the country.