Multiple videos are being shared on social media claiming it as recent visuals of Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut dancing while celebrating the collapse of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Recent dance videos of Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut while celebrating the collapse of the MVA government in Maharashtra.
Fact: The person dancing in these videos is Laxman Bhadarge, a Head constable working in the Parbhani police station in Maharashtra. These videos have nothing to do with Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When we searched for this video using relevant keywords on the internet, we found that several social media users have posted the same video with a similar description in 2019. A few other such social media posts can be seen here and here. On 05 December 2019, the ‘Sarkarnama’ news website published this video on their Facebook page and reported that a dancing video of Parbhani policeman Laxman Bhadarge was falsely going viral as the dance visuals of Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut.
Reporting the complete details of this dancing video, several news websites published articles in 2019. They can be seen here, here and here. All these news reports confirmed that the man dancing in the video is Laxman Bhadarge, a police constable who had a striking resemblance to the Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut.
The Quint fact-check team contacted Laxman Bhadarge for more clarification about this video in 2020. Speaking to the ‘Quint’ fact-check team, Laxman Bhadarge said, “The video is from November 2019. I was attending my friend’s son’s wedding. Even earlier, the video had gone viral with the false claim that it shows Sanjay Raut”. Also, Laxman Bhadarge sent a video explanation regarding his dancing video to ‘Fact Crescedo’.
On reverse image search of the screenshots of the video, a video with similar visuals was found to be tweeted by a few news portals recently. These news portals reported it as the dancing video of Sanjay Raut’s duplicate. Also, when you observe the video carefully, one could see that the man was performing similar dance steps as shown in the above video. Though we could not confirm when this video was shot, from all these pieces of evidence, it can be concluded that the man dancing in the video is not Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut.
Videos showing Sanjay Raut dancing along with the NCP leader Supriya Sole at his daughter’s wedding can be seen here, here and here.
To sum it up, unrelated videos of a Maharashtra policeman are being shared as the dance videos of Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut.
