A photo collage through a post is being widely shared on social media claiming that students from JNU were faking their injuries amidst the violence in JNU on Ram Navami. Let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo collage proving that JNU students faked their injuries amidst the violence in JNU on Ram Navami.
Fact: There was a gap of six minutes between the two photos. The photo where the woman in the blue dress was unconscious was taken at 8:15 pm. The other photo of a woman bleeding was taken at 8:21 pm after she was hit by a rock. There was violence in JNU after the members of the ABVP & Left affiliated student organizations fought with each other on Ram Navami. The left affiliated student groups alleged that ABVP tried to stop cooking of non-vegetarian food on Ram Navami. An FIR was registered against some unknown members of the ABVP by the Delhi police. The ABVP also alleged that a Ram Navami puja was disrupted by left groups on campus. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When a reverse image search is done on the photo collage, a similar photo collage, though in a different sequence, was found in an article by the wire. According to the article, there was violence in JNU after the members of the ABVP allegedly tried to stop non-vegetarian food that was being cooked on Ram Navami. An FIR was registered against some unknown members of the ABVP by the Delhi police. The ABVP also alleged that a Ram Navami puja was disrupted by left groups on campus.
According to a report by NDTV, the woman bleeding in the picture is ‘Akhtarista Ansari’. She later said that she had been discharged from AIIMS. When we searched online with relevant keywords, we found a tweet from Kavita Krishnan CPI-ML leader. From the tweet, it could be inferred that the other woman in the photo, who was wearing a blue dress, is Madhurima Kundu.
Madhurima Kundu tweeted about the photos that were taken during the incident. She posted the photos along with their metadata, saying that there was a gap of 6 minutes between the two photos. She even said, “I got unconscious after being hit. After I got control over myself, and we started moving out, Akhtarista was hit by a big rock.” Multiple fact-checking agencies accessed the original images and verified the metadata to confirm the sequence of events.
To sum it up, the photo collage is shared to give the impression that students faked their injuries amidst the violence in JNU on Ram Navami.
