A short clip of people raising slogans on a railway station platform as Maharashtra Samajwadi Party leader Abu Asim Azmi walks past is going viral with the claim that among the slogans raised, one is ‘Pakistan Zindabad’.
But this claim is completely false and no ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans were raised in the state. The message being shared with the video is deliberately misleading.
CLAIM
The short clip shows a political leader walking down a railway platform surrounded by some other people, as others raise slogans of ‘Abu Azmi Zindabad’ and ‘Mumbai Police Zindabad’ etc.
The video, uploaded by a Facebook handle called सुदर्शन News Channelfans, had 42k views and 3.6k shares at the time this story was published.
The message being shared with the video claims that ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans were raised in Mumbai and that this took place in front of Maharashtra’s Samajwadi Party leader Abu Azmi.
“#मुंबई में लगे #पाकिस्तान #जिंदाबाद के नारे... #ठाकरे सरकार में #सपा पार्टी के कोटे से मंत्री #अब्बू #आज़मी के सामने लगते रहे पाकिस्तान जिंदाबाद के नारे ,” reads the message.
The video was viral on Facebook and Twitter with this claim.
We were also able to find the clip on Facebook with a similar claim in English, which added the location of the clip as Wadala station.
WHAT WE FOUND
We were able to confirm that the political leader seen in the video is indeed Abu Asim Azmi, the president of the Maharashtra state branch of the Samajwadi Party.
Further, on checking his Twitter page, we found that Azmi himself had called out the claim as fake, reporting tweets by people who had said that ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans were raised in front of him.
In a video tweeted out by him on Sunday, 17 May, Azmi acknowledges the rumours doing the rounds and says that nobody would be able to raise ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans in front of him and get away with it and that he himself would set them right for such an act.
He further adds that this trend of spreading hatred through such claims has been been prevalent in the country since 2014.
According to him, the video had been shot at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminal, where he, along with many party workers, had gone to see off migrant workers boarding a train to Uttar Pradesh.
The Quint then found the original and slightly longer version of the video, uploaded on social media and video sharing platform TikTok by a user by the name jabirkhan406.
In this video, it can be clearly heard that the slogan actually being chanted is ‘Sajid bhai’ and not ‘Pakistan Zindabad’.
Now, based on the information that Azmi had gone to the station with multiple Samajwadi Party workers, we ran a search for a Sajid in the party and found that Sajid Siddiqui is the district president for South Central Mumbai.
Therefore, it is clear that no Pakistan Zindabad slogans were raised and that a slogan of ‘Sajid bhai Zindabad’ is being used to spread this claim.
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