A video, which shows Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan hoisting the flag of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and singing the national anthem, has gone viral linking it to the 75th anniversary of Independence.
The video is being shared with people claiming that the while the BJP leaders are requesting others to hoist the Indian flag, their leaders are disrespecting the same by unfurling the party flag.
However, we found that while the video indeed shows the CM hoisting the BJP flag, it is from 2018 during the 'Panchayat Chalo Abhiyan'.
The viral video is from the Khajwa village of the Chhatarpur District in Madhya Pradesh. This clip was heavily criticised at that time by the Indian National Congress and they had demanded action against Chouhan.
CLAIM
The claim suggests that the MP CM along with his party workers hoisted the BJP flag instead of the Indian national flag and sang the national anthem on the occasion of Independence Day.
It goes on to state that the BJP is playing dirty politics where on one side they are requesting the citizens to be a part of the 'Har Ghar Tiranga' campaign and on the another, their party workers are disrespecting the national flag.
An archive of the post can be seen here.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We fragmented the video into several keyframes using a video verification tool, InVID, and followed this up with a reverse image search using Yandex search engine.
This led us to the same video uploaded on YouTube on 17 May 2018.
The description of video mentioned that the incident happened during an event of 'Panchayat Chalo Abhiyan' at Raj Nagar, Chhatarpur district.
Taking this as a clue, we conducted a keyword search and came across a news report published in Patrika on 16 May 2018. It stated that on 14 May, Chouhan attended the 'Panchayat Chalo Abhiyan' in Khajwa village, where this incident happened.
We also found several older tweets from journalists and retired officials from 2018 which spoke about the same incident.
Evidently, a four-year-old video of Shivraj Singh Chouhan is being shared as the CM unfurling the BJP flag on the 76th Independence Day.
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