Video of People Waving Saffron Flags on Mosque in UP Falsely Shared as Karauli

Ghazipur SP Ram Badan Singh confirmed that the video was from Gahmar village in UP’s Ghazipur.

A video of a group of people climbing atop the entrance of a mosque and waving saffron flags and raising “Jai Shri Ram” slogans with loud music playing in the background, is going viral across social media with a claim that it is from Rajasthan’s Karauli.

The claim comes after communal clashes erupted in Karauli, Rajasthan on Saturday, 2 April, when a bike rally taken out on the occasion of the Hindu New Year was met with stone-pelting as it passed through a market lane.

However, we found that the video is not from Rajasthan, but shows a mosque in Gahmar village in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur district.

Ghazipur SP Ram Badan Singh confirmed the same to The Quint, adding that the person seen on the mosque in the video has been identified as a minor and no arrests have been made in connection to the case.

CLAIM

The viral video is being shared with claims in Hindi, which say that the Hindus in Karauli planted a saffron flag on a mosque after communal violence erupted in the area.

The video was also shared by journalist Rana Ayyub on Instagram as visuals from Rajasthan. At the time of writing this article, Ayyub’s post was viewed over 3.4 lakh times.

Archives of more posts with the same claim can be seen here, here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We divided the viral video into keyframes with the help of InVID, a video verification tool and ran reverse image searches on some of them.

One of the results that we came across was a tweet by account ‘HindutvaWatch’ that noted that the video was from Gahmar in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur.

Taking a cue from this, we ran keyword searches across social media platforms and found that the oldest video was shared by one 'Sayyed Uzma Parveen' on Twitter.

The user also shared more photos of the mosque, mentioning that the video was being wrongly shared as incidents from other places.

We contacted Ghazipur SP Ram Badan Singh regarding the video, who confirmed that the video was indeed from Ghazipur and not from Karauli as claimed.

“The mosque is in Gahmar and a FIR has been registered at the local police station, against unknown persons. We’ve been able to identify a 14-15 year old boy as the one who climbed on the mosque and are working to identify the others. The atmosphere in the village has been peaceful since.”

Ghazipur SP Ram Badan Singh

The Quint also accessed a copy of the FIR registered in connection to the case.

Next, we looked for photos of the area and came across a Facebook post from 2020 where the location was tagged as Gahmar, that discussed spraying sanitiser around different lanes in ward number 13 of Gahmar, including the mosque area.

One of the photos shared in this post closely resembles a frame from the viral video.

One can see that both photos show a similar arch near the staircase.

Evidently, a video from Gahmar village in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur is being shared to falsely claim that it shows Hindus in Karauli climbing atop a mosque and dancing with saffron flags.

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