Old Video Shared as Indian Navy’s Diwali Celebrations

The video of illuminated ships and fireworks has gone viral on Facebook with the claim that the video shows celebrations by Indian Navy during Diwali 2020.

However, we found that the video was of the International Fleet Review which happened in Visakhapatnam in 2016.

CLAIM

One user shared the video with the caption, “Indian Navy celebrating Diwali 2020”. Others used similar captions too like, “Celebration of Diwali by INDIAN NAVY.”

Some users shared the same video with a Diwali song while others included the message in the video.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We extracted the keyframes using the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension and conducted a reverse image search on selected keyframes.

While going through the results, we came across a longer version of the viral video posted on YouTube in 2016 that was titled, “Lit up warships of the Indian Navy fire flares on the Bay of Bengal”.

The description of the video said, “Illuminated warships and fireworks on Eastern Naval Command during International Fleet Review organised by Indian Navy.”

We looked up “International Fleet Review 2016” on Google and found news reports which contained screenshots from the viral video. The Quint too reported on the event in photo-story published on 3 February 2016.

We also found photographs of the rehearsal posted by the Twitter handle of The Principal Spokesperson, Ministry of Defence.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official YouTube channel also had the complete video of the event. Clips from the viral video can be seen from 31:00.

Evidently, an old video from the 2016 International Flight Review was shared with a false claim that it showed Indian Navy’s Diwali 2020 celebrations.

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