A photograph (here, here and here) showing a sea of people is currently circulating on social media platforms. It is being claimed that the photograph depicts the crowd at the I.N.D.I.A bloc rally held at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The viral photograph shows the large gathering at the I.N.D.I.A bloc’s rally at Ramlila Maidan.
Fact: The photograph in question is from 2019 and actually shows an enormous public assembly for a meeting organised by the left-front parties at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade Ground. Therefore, the claim made in the post is False.
To determine the truthfulness of the claim, we performed a reverse image search on the photograph. This led us to an article from 2019, which indicated that the image was actually of a large crowd assembled for a public meeting organised by the left parties in Kolkata.
Further investigation led us to a tweet (archived post) from 2020 by CPI (M) West Bengal, which contained the same photograph. The caption of this tweet read, “A bird’s eye video of last year’s Brigade Rally at #Kolkata.”
While the I.N.D.I.A bloc rally conducted at Ramlila Maidan on 31 March 2024 reportedly drew thousands of supporters (here), the viral image is unrelated to this event.
To sum up, the photograph in circulation does not depict the I.N.D.I.A bloc rally at Ramlila Maidan but a different event from 2019.
