A post accompanying a video of a Hindu procession is being widely shared across social media platforms with a claim that the video is of the procession carried out in the same area in Ujjain where an incident of stone pelting took place earlier. Through this article let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Procession of Hindus in the same area in Ujjain where stones were pelted on a rally organized to raise funds for Ram Temple construction in Ayodhya.
Fact: Though the actual date of the procession in the video is not known, it is available on the internet at least for a year. The video has nothing to do with the Ujjain stone-pelting incident and is actually from Gulbarga, Karnataka. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Reverse image search of the screenshots of the video in the post led us to a 2019 YouTube video which carried visuals similar to the video in the post. The title of the video reads ‘Ram Navami Shobha yatra in Kalaburagi. By. RSS and. BJP supports’. This establishes that the video is at least a year old.
Taking a cue from this YouTube video, Google search with ‘Ram Navami Gulbarga Shobha Yatra 2019’ as a keyword yielded many 2019 YouTube videos similar to the one in the post. However, we could not find the exact date of this yatra.
Further by juxtaposing the screenshots of the YouTube videos and the video in the post, we can spot similarities in both these videos.
In one of the screenshots of the YouTube video, we can spot ‘Basavaganga Medical & Enterprises’ on one of the billboards. Taking a cue from this, search on Google maps with relevant keyword led us to a location in Gulbarga where a medical store with the same name is located near a Mosque.
All these establish that this is an old video of a Hindu procession in Gulbarga and has nothing to do with the Ujjain stone-pelting incident. However, the exact date of this procession is not known.
In the light of an incident in Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh) in which four persons are arrested under the Nation Security Act (NSA) for pelting stones on a rally organized by Bajrang Dal in order to raise funds for the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, posts like these are being shared with misleading claims.
To sum it up, old video of a Hindu procession from Karnataka is falsely shared linking it to the Ujjain stone pelting incident.
