A post with a photo collage is being widely shared on social media claiming that the woman in the photos is Bilkis Dadi who is on a visit to Ayodhya. Let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo collage of Bilkis Dadi visiting Ayodhya.
Fact: The photo collage does not show Bilkis Dadi visiting Ayodhya. The first photo is of an elderly woman (not Bilkis Dadi) being greeted by Arvind Kejriwal, who was on a pilgrimage to Ayodhya under ‘Mukhyamantri Tirth Yatra Yojana’ of the Delhi government. The second photo is of Mohinder Kaur, an octogenarian farmers’ union member, taken in 2020. Bilkis Bano or Bilkis Dadi rose to fame after she was involved in the anti-CAA protests held in Shaheen Bagh. There are no recent articles which say that Bilkis Dadi was going to visit Ayodhya. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
When reverse image search is done on the photo collage, the first photo (left side) of the collage was found in a tweet posted by Arvind Kejriwal. The tweet was made on 03 December 2021 when Arvind Kejriwal was at the Safdarjung Railway Station to flag off a train for the pilgrims visiting Ayodhya. It was the first train to Ayodhya under the ‘Mukhyamantri Tirth Yatra Yojana’ launched by the Kejriwal government in 2019. There was no mention of Bilkis Bano (or Bilkis Dadi) in any of the news reports about the event.
When reverse image search is done on the second photo (right side), a similar photo was found in a tweet by a journalist. The tweet made on 25 November says that she was a woman farmer marching to Delhi for the farmers’ protest. Even a news report that carried the same photo, mentioned her as an elderly woman. There was no mention of Bilkis Dadi here.
When a similar claim went viral in 2020 saying that the woman in the photo is Bilkis Dadi, Boom had written a fact-check article identifying the woman as “Mohinder Kaur, an octogenarian farmers’ union member”.
Bilkis Bano or Bilkis Dadi rose to fame after she was involved in the anti-CAA protests held in Shaheen Bagh. There are no recent articles that say Bilkis Dadi was going to visit Ayodhya. We were not able to independently identify the women in the photo collage.
To sum it up, this photo collage of elderly women is falsely shared as Bilkis Dadi visiting Ayodhya.
