Woman With Azad Misidentified as Hathras’ Alleged ‘Naxal Bhabhi’

The woman is Kiran Yadav, a popular social media user from Bihar who claims to be a social worker.

An image of Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad standing with a woman is being circulated on social media with several users identifying this woman as the alleged ‘Naxal Bhabhi’ or Dr Rajkumari Bansal from Hathras.

Dr Bansal, a resident of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, is being accused of having Naxal links and pretending to be the sister-in-law of the Hathras victim.

However, we at The Quint found that the aforementioned woman is a popular social media user from Bihar, Kiran Yadav, who claims to be a social worker.

CLAIM

Several users on Facebook and Twitter shared the aforementioned image with captions insinuating that this is a big reveal as the Bhim Army Chief can be seen with Rajkumari Bansal.

A few days after the Hathras incident, several social media users and websites claimed that Dr Rajkumari Bansal, a medical professional from Jabalpur claiming to be the `sister’ or ‘bhabhi’ (sister-in-law) of the victim, had been staying at the victim’s house in Hathras and was trying to control the narrative.

WHAT WE FOUND

We found a video of Dr Rajkumari Bansal, a physician at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Medical College, where she can be seen interacting with the local media.

We compared a screengrab from that video with the viral photo on social media and found that the person standing with Azad is not Bansal.

The Quint reached out to Bansal, who confirmed to us that the woman in the viral photo is not her and ever since her visit to Hathras several such rumours around her are doing the rounds on social media.

Next, we reached out to a spokesperson from the Bhim Army who told us that the woman standing next to Azad is Kiran Yadav, a social media influencer from Bihar.

We searched for Kiran’s profiles on Twitter and Facebook and found several photos of her which suggested that she is the one standing with Azad in the viral photo.

Here’s a side by side comparison of images on her profile with that of the viral image.

Evidently, an image of a social media influencer with Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad was shared on the internet with a false claim that she is the alleged ‘Naxal Bhabhi’ from Hathras.

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