Unrelated old videos shared as visuals of Indians destroying idols due to their anger over COVID-19 - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
June 2, 2021
A video of a purported news bulletin by ‘Shia Waves’ news channel is being shared on social media claiming that a large number of Indian Hindus have thrown away the idols of Gods on the streets. This news bulletin had shared two different video clips of people disposing of the idols of Hindu Gods. This post claims it as the visuals of Indians expressing their anger towards the Gods for not protecting them from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video clips of Indians throwing the idols of their Gods on the streets due to their anger over Coronavirus.
Fact: The first video clip in the post was captured in 2019, in Ahmedabad city in Gujarat. The second video clip was shot at Telangana’s Beechupally village in 2015. Both the video clips were shot well before the first COVID-19 virus case in the country. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
The news bulletin shared in the post shows two different video clips of people disposing of the idols. Let’s find the details of each video clip one by one.
Clip-1:
On reverse image search of the screenshots in the video, a video with similar visuals is found in reply to a Tweet (archive) by IAS officer Vijay Nehra on 11 August 2019. In the tweet, IAS  Vijay Nehra mentioned Ahmedabad citizens’ appreciable gesture of leaving the Dashama idols on the riverbank of Sabarmati in Ahmedabad. Multiple users had shared the same video on social media in August 2019. They can be seen here and here. Hence, it can be confirmed that the video was shot well before the first COVID-19 virus case in India.
Thanks pic.twitter.com/6kjucsnJTn
In 2019, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation had requested citizens to leave Dashama idols on the riverbank of Sabarmati to prevent pollution. Following the municipal corporation’s requests, devotees left their idols on the riverbank of Sabarmati. News articles and videos that reported this incident of Ahmedabadis leaving their idols on the riverfront of  Sabarmati can be seen here, here and here.
Clip-2:
On reverse image search, a video with similar visuals is found in a Facebook post by a user on 24 September 2015. This user mentioned it as the visuals of devotees immersing Ganapathi idols from the Krishna river bridge located on NH44 in Mahbubnagar district of Telangana.
When we searched to find the location of this bridge on ‘Google Maps’, the visuals of the bridge in the video matched with the Rangapur Krishna Pushkar Ghat bridge located at Beechupally village in Mahabubnagar district of Telangana. It can hence be concluded that the video shared in the post is an old one and not related to the coronavirus pandemic in India.
Also, we could not find any such news bulletin on the official YouTube channel of ‘Shia Wave’. We found an article published with a similar headline on the ‘Shia Wave’ news website. But, the images shared in the article are different from the visuals shared in the post.
To sum it up, unrelated old videos are shared as visuals of Indian Hindus throwing idols of their Gods on the streets due to their anger over COVID-19.