Jammu Picture Passed Off as Navaratri in Delhi Amid COVID Lockdown
The image that is being claimed to be taken during Navaratri is not from Delhi but Jammu and was taken on 28 March.
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CLAIM
A set of images are being shared to claim that they are from Delhi and have been published by news agency ANI. One of the photos, in which a security personnel can be seen on empty roads, is being claimed to be a picture from Navaratri.
The other image, that has an ANI stamp on it, and shows people thronging on the street amid coronavirus lockdown, is claimed to have been taken during Ramzan.
The claim in Hindi reads, “ये हैं अरविंद केजरीवाल की दिल्ली की तस्वीरें, जो आज न्यूज एजेंसी ANI ने पब्लिश की हैं | (Translation: This is Arvind Kejriwal’s Delhi, these pictures were published by news agency ANI).”
Several social media users have shared the images on Twitter and Facebook with the same claim.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The image that is being claimed to have been taken during Navaratri is not from Delhi but Jammu. While the other image, claimed to be taken during Ramzan, is indeed from Delhi.
The claim mentions that the images have been shared by ANI, but in reality, only one of them is an ANI image and the other one is a PTI image.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
IMAGE 1
We did a Google reverse image search of the photo that is being shared to show Delhi’s situation during Navaratri and found an India Today article with the headline: “Jammu and Kashmir a week into nationwide coronavirus lockdown.” The article, dated 1 April, had attributed the image to news agency PTI.
On looking at the image carefully, we found that the barricades read “JMC” ( Jammu Municipal Corporation) and even the bike standing near the blue dustbin has a “JK” number plate. This indicated that the image could be from Jammu.
We reached out to Ankur Sethi, PTI photographer in Jammu, who had clicked the photo in question. Speaking to The Quint, he said, “This is photo is not from Delhi, but from Jammu, and I clicked it on 28 March.”
It is pertinent to note that Navaratri began from 25 March and ended on 2 April.
He further informed that the image is of a security personnel standing guard at Raghunath Bazaar amid coronavirus lockdown.
The photographer shared the raw image with us and on finding the EXIF data of the image, using a tool called metadata2GO, we saw that the image was indeed created on 28 March.
IMAGE 2
We found that the second image in circulation, which has ANI stamp on it, was shared by the news agency on 24 April. The viral picture is the third image in ANI’s tweet and is from a market in Shastri Park area in northeast Delhi. It is pertinent to note that Ramzan began on 23 April this year.
To corroborate the claims being made about the aforementioned picture, we spoke to Sukant Ballabh, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police, Delhi’s northeast district, who said that some people had indeed come out on the streets on 24 April, in Shastri Park area, amid the coronavirus lockdown.
Evidently, an image from Jammu is being falsely used to claim that it is from Delhi.
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