CLAIM
Amid the ongoing protests against the amended Citizenship Act, a viral video on social media claims that protesters burnt posters with images of Hindu gods and goddesses.
The video shows a group of people sloganeering and burning posters with images of Hindu gods. The video, tweeted by Dr Jayasree Nair, had over 3,600 retweets and 3,400 likes at the time of publishing this article.
BJP National Spokesperson Sambit Patra also shared the video, questioning, “Why should any protest be an anti-Hindu protest?”
Several social media users also shared the video on Facebook with a similar narrative.
The Quint also received a query via its WhatsApp Helpline about the claim made in the video.
WHAT’S THE TRUTH?
The video is not from the ongoing CAA protests, but is an old video.
We searched on TweetDeck using the keywords “Hindu+god+poster” and found a tweet that was shared on 28 August 2018. The tweet carried the same video and claimed that, “a group of Ambedkarites beat posters of Hindu god/goddesses.”
We then searched on Facebook with the keywords “Ambedkarites+Hindu+gods” and found that the same video was shared on 14 August 2018, which claimed that the incident took place in Karnataka’s Mysuru.
The caption shared along with the video reads: “Young Ambedkarites burning portraits of Hindu Gods in Ashokpuram MYSORE to protest against Sanghis who burned copies of the Constitution.”
The Quint has not been able to independently verify the origin of the video.
On carefully listening to the video, we heard slogans in Kannada saying “Sangh Parivar: those who are against Constitution, those opposed to Ambedkar, those who want Brahmanism, Vedic order, Brahmanic order, Hindu religion, Murdabad to all this (sic)”
Thus, an old video was used to propagate the false narrative that it is from the ongoing CAA protests.
This story was earlier debunked by BOOM.
(The Quint has reached out to Mysuru Police and the story will be updated as and when they get back to us.)
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