The newly constructed Ram Mandir in Ayodhya will be consecrated on 22 January 2024. In the run-up to this, a video of a saffron-clad man hand-walking on a road has gone viral on social media. It is being claimed that he is on his way to Ayodhya. Mainstream media outlets like TV 9 Bharatvarsh and India TV also reported this. This article aims to fact-check this claim.
Claim: A video of a man hand-walking to Ayodhya for the consecration ceremony.
Fact: The person seen in the viral video is Nihal Singh, aka ‘Bichoo Bam’ from Bihar. He is hand-walking to Basukinath from Deoghar as part of his 160km hand-walking yatra/journey to Lord Shiva Shrines. He started this yatra on 4 July 2023. Speaking to Factly, he refuted the viral claim that he is travelling to Ayodhya and clarified that he is on his way to Basukinath and it might take him one more month to reach there. Hence, the claim made in the viral post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we first performed a reverse image search on the internet using a few keyframes from the viral video. This search led us to reports (here and here) on a man named Nihal Singh, who is hand-walking like a Bichoo (Scorpion) to Basukinath temple as part of his 160 km yatra to Shiva shrines, which started from Sultanganj, Bihar. He is the same person seen in the viral video. His story was covered by mainstream media outlets in July 2023 when he started this yatra on 4 July 2023 (here and here).
Further search on the internet revealed that he had done a Jal Abhishek in Baidyanath temple, Deogarh, on 31 December 2023 and is now on his way to Basukinath temple. In an interview he gave on 16 January 2024, he said that he had covered hardly 15 km of his route to Basukinath from Deogarh.
Additionally, Factly found his number on Facebook and contacted him. Speaking to us on the phone, he refuted the viral claim that his video shows him hand-walking to Ayodhya. He clarified that it was a false claim. He added that mainstream media outlets, too, have run this fake news while, in reality, he is hand-walking to Basukinath temple, which, in his words, might take him one more month to reach there.
To sum up, this video does not show a devotee travelling to Ayodhya on his hands. It shows a man named Nihal Singh, who is on a yatra to Basukinath temple, Jharkhand, from Sultanganj, Bihar.
