This video does not show the founder of Himalaya drug company giving a communal speech - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
March 13, 2024
A post featuring a video of a man giving a communal speech, urging the Muslim community to ‘take over’ various professions, including the judiciary, police department, administrative services, healthcare, and other fields, is widely shared across social media platforms. The claim associated with the post suggests that the man in the video is Mohammad Manal, the founder of the Himalaya Drug Company. This article aims to fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Mohammad Manal, the owner of the Himalaya Company, delivering a communal speech.
Fact: The man featured in the viral video is not the founder of the Himalaya Company, Mohammed Manal. Mohammed Manal passed away in 1986. Moreover, the man featured in the viral video doesn’t have any association with the Himalaya group. The Himalaya group refuted this claim, responding to a post with a similar claim on Twitter in 2020. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To verify the authenticity of the viral claim, we checked the Himalaya website and found that the man featured in the viral video is neither the founder of the Himalaya Drug Company nor the current chairman of the Himalaya group. In fact, Mohammed Manal, the founder of Himalaya, passed away in 1986 according to information provided by the company. Meraj Manal is the current Chairman of Himalaya Global Holdings Ltd.
This video has been circulating on social media with the same claim since 2020. When it went viral in 2020, claiming the person in the video was the owner of Himalaya Drug Company, the Himalaya group refuted this claim in response to a post on X (Twitter) (archived version can be seen here) on 27 September 2020.
To learn more about the video and the person featured in it, we conducted a Google reverse image search on the internet. This search led us to an article published by Siasat Daily on 07 September 2020. The article included a screenshot from the viral video, stating that a “lawyer” had urged Muslims to focus on representation in “IT, government, law enforcement, and the judiciary” instead of “mourning Babri demolition.”
Taking a cue from this, we conducted a relevant search in web archives, which led us to a Facebook video uploaded on a page named “Naqi Ahmed Nadwi.” The video was captioned: “The demolition of Babri Masjid and the establishment of Ram Mandir in its place is a twist in the history of India which Muslims must consider seriously!” (Translated from Urdu to English). On his Facebook account, Nadwi states that he’s from Sheohar, a district in Bihar.
Nadwi also has a YouTube channel with the same name, where you can find similar videos on Islam and Muslims in India. However, we couldn’t verify whether the man in the video is Naqi Ahmed Nadwi, as claimed by the profiles that have shared the viral clip. From all this information, it is evident that the man in the viral video is not the founder of The Himalaya Drug Company.
To sum it up, this viral video of a man giving a communal speech is being falsely peddled as the founder of the Himalaya drug company giving a communal speech.