Old Photo of Durga Puja Ritual Shared With a False Communal Claim

The photo dates back to 2017 and shows a man participating in ritual animal sacrifice during Durga Puja in Assam.

Sharing a screenshot of a post which shows a man carrying a severed buffalo head on top of his head, social media users claimed that the photo was of that of the Hindu priest in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh.

• Those sharing the post associated the photograph with a recent communal tensions in Ratlam, where four persons were arrested for throwing cow parts into a temple on Friday, 14 June.

(Archives of more posts sharing similar claims can be seen here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: No, the photograph is old and unrelated to the incident in Madhya Pradesh.

• It dates back to September 2017 and shows a devotee participating in ritualistic animal sacrifice in Assam's Belsor, on the occassion of Durga Puja.

How did we find out?: We ran a reverse image search on the viral image using Google Lens, which led us to the same photograph on stock image website Getty Images.

• Its title mentioned that it showed a buffalo sacrifice at the Billeshwar Dewalaya Temple, dedicated to Hindu goddess Durga, during Durga Puja.

The image's caption stated that the photo was taken on 29 September 2017, in Assam's Belsor, which lies on the outskirts of Guwahati.

• Using the temple's name as keywords, we looked for more information related to the photo.

• This led us to a Times of India report published in 2017, which mentioned that the 500-year-old Billeshwar Dewalaya had seen an uptick in the number of people booking buffaloes for sacrifice, despite restrictions around animal slaughter.

• One of the temple secrataries had mentioned that they had received bookings for 46 buffaloes that year, the report added.

• Another TOI report, published amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, said that the temple, which saw 50 sacrifices each year, would only carry out one buffalo sacrifice due to the virus.

Conclusion: An old photo of a ritualistic animal sacrifice in Assam is being falsely linked to a recent incident of people throwing cow parts in a temple in Madhya Pradesh.

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