An edited photo of a woman with her relative is falsely shared as her being a 6-year-old who married a 67-year-old man
A photo (here, here and here) is going viral on social media showing an elderly man with a woman who appears to be a young girl, with the claim that a 67-year-old man named Bhupendra Mishra married a 6-year-old girl. Let’s find out the truth behind this photo.
Claim: A 67-year-old man named Bhupendra Mishra married a 6-year-old girl.
Fact: The photo is digitally edited. The original photo shows a young man named Dhavan Rathod, a relative of the woman, Shilpa Rathod. She is not a 6-year-old child; she is an adult and is married to a man named Nirav Limbani — not Bhupendra Mishra. Hence the viral claim is FALSE.
To verify the claim, we performed a reverse image search on Google, which led us to a similar photo in which a young man, not elderly, is seen with the same woman. The original photo was posted by Shilpa Rathod Limbani on her Instagram account on 24 May 2024, with the caption “Happy Brother’s Day and miss you so much bro.” The post also included other photos of her celebrating the occasion with her brothers.
Further verification confirmed that Shilpa Rathod is an adult and a public figure on social media with around 90,000 followers. To check her marital status, her Facebook profile was reviewed, where she mentioned being married since February 2020. Her profiles on both Instagram and Facebook include several posts with her husband, whose name is Nirav Limbani — as mentioned in his Instagram and YouTube accounts — and he does not resemble the man seen in the viral photo (here, here and here).
Further, a post shared by Shilpa on 14 August 2024, shows her celebrating Rakshabandhan with the same man as in the viral photo, along with others. The caption read “Happy Rakshabandhan,” further confirming that the man in the photo is her brother or relative. Notably, we also found his Instagram account, which carries the surname Dhavan Rathod, closely matching Shilpa’s.
Another post-dated 25 March 2025 shows Shilpa participating in a function during the Mameru rituals. In this video, too, the same man appears, clearly indicating he is a family member and regularly seen in her posts.
A closer look at the viral and original images confirms that the viral photo has been digitally altered. The man in the original photo is Dhavan Rathod, a relative of Shilpa Rathod, the woman seen in the photo. She is married to someone else, not the person shown in the edited viral photo.
To sum up, an edited photo of a woman with her relative is falsely shared as her being a 6-year-old who married a 67-year-old man.