A video showing a massive crowd has recently been circulating on social media platforms. The claim associated with this video asserts that the visuals show crowds gathered during Rahul Gandhi’s recent Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Maharashtra. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The video shows a large crowd gathered in support of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Maharashtra.
Fact: The same video is available on the internet from 5 March 2024, well before the Maharashtra leg of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra began on 12 March 2024. Therefore, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the viral claim, we carried out a reverse image search on keyframes of the viral video. This search led us to the same viral video uploaded by an Instagram user named ‘abhijeet__kalage__33k’.
This video was published on 5 March 2024, which is a week before the Maharashtra leg of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, which began on 12 March 2024 (here, here, and here). This clearly indicates that the video uploaded by Abhijeet couldn’t have been related to Rahul Gandhi’s yatra in Maharashtra.
Additionally, some users mentioned in the comments that the video is from ‘Examba bailgada sharyat,’ an event featuring bullock races held in Examba, a region in the Belagavi District of Karnataka. We found several related videos uploaded by other users on YouTube and Facebook (here, here and here ). One of these videos displays a poster identical to the one seen in the viral clip.
This evidence suggests that the viral video is most likely from this local event rather than Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Maharashtra. India Today’s correspondent from Belagavi District, Deepak Suryavanshi, also confirmed that the viral video is from Belagavi District. According to him, this video was filmed in Chikodi village in Karnataka’s Belagavi District.
To sum up, the video circulating on social media platforms is not from Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Maharashtra, as claimed, but from a local event held in Karnataka.
