This photo of the Keoratola Crematorium with an 'I Love Keoratola Mahasashan' sign board is fake - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
April 12, 2023
A photo of a building with a board that reads ‘I Love Keoratola Mahasashan’ is being shared on social media. Keoratola Mahasashan, or Crematorium, is located in Kolkata, which is one of the city’s largest cremation grounds. Let’s fact-check the photo in the post through this article.
Claim: A photo of Keoratola Crematorium with a board that reads ‘ I Love Keoratola Maasashan.‘
Fact: This is an edited image of a photo of the Crematorium from 2011. The original image does not contain a board in front of the building. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Performing a keyword search on the internet to check if any board that reads ‘I Love Keoratola Mahasashan’ was installed in front of the Keoratola Crematorium led us to a few news articles that reported (here and here) this image to be fake.
While quoting Mamata Banerjee, the Kolkata Tribune wrote, “News are being spread about the Keoratala crematorium again. I love Keoratala! It didn’t actually happen. This is completely false….I condemn those who make fun of cremation.”
‘In the context of this incident, local councillor Mala Roy himself said that no such work was done in the crematorium,’ News Khabriya reported. Reportedly, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, felt upset over this photo and asked the Kolkata City Police Commissioner Vineet Kumar Goyal to find about the persons who uploaded this picture on social media. Eventually, the police identified the person responsible for it.
Meanwhile, to know the details of the original photo, we performed a reverse image search on Google using the viral photo. This led us to the original image from 2011, which is available on Wikimedia Commons. The original photo contains no board that reads ‘ I Love Keoratola Mahasashan.’ A 2019 news report published by the Times of India also contained this image which has no signboard.
To sum up, this photo of the Keoratola Crematorium with an ‘ I Love Keoratola Mahasashan’ sign board is fake.