Pakistani Wrestler Misidentified as Dhirendra Shastri of Bageshwar Dham

The original video shows that the person was a Pakistani wrestler called Ghulam Hussain Pathan.

A video showing two people wrestling, with one of them pinning the other, is going viral on the internet.

The claim: The video has been shared with the claim that the person pinning the wrestler is Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, also known as Bageshwar Dham Sarkar of Bageshwar Dham temple, located in the Gada village of Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh.

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Why is it relevant?: Shastri has been in the news recently for performing various "miracles" in his satsangs (a gathering for the performance of devotional songs and speeches). Maharashtra-based rationalist organisation, Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, have challenged him to demonstrate his miraculous power.

The truth: The person in the video is not Shastri, but a Pakistani wrestler Ghulam Hussain Pathan, who comes from the Sindh region of the country.

How did we find that out: We used the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension to extract keyframes from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search on some of them.

• While going through the search results, we came across a YouTube video that had the viral clip.

• The video was uploaded on to a verified YouTube channel called Sachal TV, a Pakistan-based channel which uploads videos of a type of wrestling known as Sindhi Malh Malakhro.

• The video uploaded on 6 November 2020 was titled, "New Sindhi malakhra Ghullam Hussain Pathan."

• We compared the person in the video with Shastri, which shows they are not the same.

Who is Ghulam Hussain Pathan: We conducted a keyword search for Ghulam Hussain and found several videos of him wrestling.

• Images on the stock image website, Shutterstock, also showed his pictures with the caption, "Wrestler Ghulam Hussain Pathan fights his opponent during the traditional Sindhi Malakhra wrestling in Karachi, Pakistan."

• We also came across a news interview of Ghulam Hussain on NTV News HD. Hussain has also shared pictures of his wrestling on his Facebook and Instagram profiles.

Conclusion: A video from Pakistan has gone viral as Bageshwar Dham temple's priest Dhirendra Shastri wrestling and pinning his opponent.

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