Recently, a video of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar allegedly carrying out a march demanding a special category status for Bihar went viral. This viral 30-second-long video is a news report by ‘ABP News.’ We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of Bihar CM Nitish Kumar carrying out a march demanding a special category status for Bihar in 2024.
Fact: The viral video is a clip from a 2014 news report published by ‘ABP News.’ This shows Nitish Kumar speaking to a news reporter of the ‘ABP News’ while he was marching towards Gandhi Maidan in Patna to sit for a protest demanding special status for Bihar. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet, looking for the news report by ABP News as seen in the viral video. This search led us to the original report published on ABP’s official YouTube channel on 2 March 2014.
According to this report titled ‘Nitish Kumar marches to Gandhi Maidan demanding ‘special status’ to Bihar,’ Nitish Kumar carried out a march from his house to Gandhi Maidan for the cause. In the video, he says he is fighting for Bihar’s rights (Special Category status).
Further search led us to multiple news reports (here, here, and here) in 2014. As per these reports, he called for a ‘bandh,’ which resulted in his supporters blocking the roads and railway lines across the state.
Furthermore, we found no recent news reports on Nitish Kumar carrying out a march demanding a special category status for Bihar. This makes it clear that a ten-year-old video is being falsely shared as a recent one.
To sum up, a video from 2014 is now falsely shared as visuals of Nitish Kumar carrying out a march demanding a special status for Bihar.
