Old B’desh Clip Used to Show BJP MLA ‘Anil Upadhyay’ Hunting Deer

It is an old video from Bangladesh and the person seen in the video had been identified as one Moin Uddin.

A viral video on social media claims to show an MLA of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ‘Anil Upadhyay,’ learning how to shoot and hunt down a deer in a park.

However, we found that the video is from Bangladesh and dates back to 2015. The person in the video had been identified as one Moin Uddin. Further, MLA ‘Anil Upadhyay’ is a fictional identity and no such person could be found being associated with the BJP as an MLA.

CLAIM

The claim shared along with the video reads: “सलमान खान अभी भी हिरणों के शिकार के लिए अदालतों का चक्कर लगा रहे हैं। लेकिन बीजेपी के इस विधायक अनिल उपाध्याय एक पार्क में हिरण को गोली मारकर शिकार करना सीख रहे हैं। इसे वायरल करें और अदालत उसे सजा दे।”

(Translated: Salman Khan is still visiting the courts for hunting down a deer. But this BJP MLA Anil Upadhyay is learning how to shoot and hunt deer in a park. Make it viral and the court should punish him.)

Several social media users shared the video on Facebook and Twitter with a similar claim and the archived posts can be viewed here, here and here.

The Quint received a query on the claim being made in the video on its WhatsApp tipline as well.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We divided the viral video into multiple keyframes and reverse searched them on Yandex that led us to a tweet from 2019 that carried the visuals and journalist Nolan Pinto had then replied that it is from Bangladesh.

We also came across a clarification issued on the video by IFS officer Parveen Kaswan in October 2019.

He said that the video was from Chittagong, Bangladesh. He further said that the person in the video had been identified as Moin Uddin and it was found that the incident took place in Chittagong’s Hillsdale Farm.

On searching for news reports about the incident, we came across an article by The Daily Star, a Bangladeshi English-language newspaper. The report, dated July 2015, said the incident had happened in the last week of June, and said that the video had first been uploaded on Facebook in July 2015.

According to a follow-up report published in the same month, the Department of Forest (DoF) had initiated actions against Moin Uddin.

The Quint’s WebQoof team had debunked the viral video in 2019 which was being shared with the false claim that it is from West Bengal.

WHO IS ANIL UPADHYAY?

The Quint checked for Anil Upadhyay on MyNeta, no information related to such a person being associated to BJP was found. Three Anil Upadhyays appeared in the search. Of these, two are independent and the third belongs to BSP.

This video is not the first purporting to show Anil Upadhyay as an MLA. Several pieces of misinformation and fake news have been shared using the name of the fictional MLA Anil Upadhyay. While some of them claimed Upadhyay was a BJP MLA, the rest claimed he was with Congress.

The Quint has previously debunked fake posts that have been shared using the name of the fictitious politician.

Evidently, an old video from Bangladesh resurfaced on social media to falsely claim that the man seen in the video is BJP MLA ‘Anil Upadhyay.’

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