A post circulating widely on social media (here, here, and here) claims that 100 students who raised the slogan ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ at Srinagar Medical College in Jammu & Kashmir will no longer be able to become doctors, as the government has cancelled their degrees. The post also features a photo showing several girls wearing burqas standing in formation. Let’s verify the claim made in the post in this article.
Claim: The government cancelled the degrees of the 100 girl students who raised the slogan ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ at Srinagar Medical College.
Fact: There is no truth to the claim that the government has cancelled the degrees of 100 girl students from Srinagar Medical College for raising ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ slogans, and no reports or official information support this claim. The photo shared in the post is unrelated to Srinagar Medical College and actually shows a morning assembly at Fatima Girls Inter College in Daudpur village, Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To verify the claim, we conducted a Google search using relevant keywords but did not find any credible media reports or official information supporting it. Given the significance of such an incident, it would have attracted widespread media coverage, yet no such reports were found.
A Google search of the viral photo’s screenshot led us to multiple regional media reports (here, here) dated 12 November 2017 featuring the same photo. According to these reports, the photo is from Fatima Girls Inter College in Daudpur village, Azamgarh, and was taken during a morning assembly at the institution.
We also found that in November 2017, Fatima Girls College & Schools shared a newspaper clipping on their Facebook page carrying the same photo, stating that it was taken during the morning prayer at the college.
The same photo had previously gone viral in 2021 with claims that the degrees of 100 girl students from Srinagar Medical College were cancelled for ‘celebrating’ Pakistan’s victory. At the time, several fact-checkers debunked this claim as false (here, here, and here).
For context, in October 2021, after Pakistan defeated India in a 2021 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup match, some students from GMC Srinagar and the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) reportedly to have raised pro-Pakistan slogans. The Jammu & Kashmir Police subsequently filed FIRs under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) against some students residing in the hostels of both institutions. At that time, as well, no reports mentioned the cancellation of degrees in this case.
To sum up, the government did not cancel the degrees of 100 medical students in Srinagar for allegedly raising pro-Pakistan slogans.
