Old Pic From West Bengal Shared as ‘Protest in Support of Farmers’

The image is from West Bengal in 2019 when a march was held against the privatisation of PSUs.

An image which shows a crowd of people on the streets is being shared as “Bengal in support of Farmers’ movement” on social media by several users. However, we found that the image is from 2019 and shows a march which was organised against privatisation of Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs).

CLAIM

The image is being with a caption, “किसान आंदोलन के समर्थन में बंगाल | आप भी आये | जय जवान जय किसान |” [Translation: Bengal in support of farmers’ protest. You should also come. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan]

The same is being shared on Twitter with a similar claim.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We conducted a reverse image search on the photograph and came across a Facebook post from December 2019. The post mentioned hashtags like ‘Workers long march’ and ‘stop privatisation’.

Taking a cue from here, we conducted a Google search and came across various news reports which mentioned that trade unions of the Left parties organised a long march against privatisation of PSUs in West Bengal in December, 2019.

Following this, we used Twitter Advanced search and looked for tweets with #WorkersLong March from 1 December to 31 December. We then came across a tweet by CPI(M) West Bengal from 11 December 2019 which carried the same image.

The tweet caption read, “Bird’s eye view of today's public meeting at Rani Rashmani Road which was organised to mark the culmination of 12 days long #WorkersLongMarch against privatisation, anti workers policies, divisive agenda of #NRC, #CAB & rampant retrenchment of the labors.”

As per news reports, this march continued for 12 days and the trade union supporters of the Left parties marched from Chittaranjan to Kolkata on foot.

Clearly, an unrelated image is being circulated with a false claim.

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