On 17 August 2025, Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, began the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ in Sasaram, Bihar, a 16-day march covering over 1,300 km across more than 20 districts of the state. The march comes against the backdrop of the Congress’s accusations of “vote chori” against the ECI and the INDIA Bloc’s opposition to the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar. The campaign will conclude with a rally at Gandhi Maidan in Patna on 01 September 2025 (here, here, and here).
In this context, a video showing a huge crowd on the road giving way to an ambulance is being shared on social media (here, here, and here), claiming it is from the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar. Let’s verify the claim made in the post in this article.
Claim: The video shows a crowd during the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar making way for an ambulance on the road.
Fact: The video predates the 2025 ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ in Bihar and is unrelated to the event. It was recorded during the Jagannath Rath Yatra in Puri, Odisha, where hundrends of volunteers formed a human chain to allow an ambulance to pass. The location is identified as Town Mouza, Police Station, Senapati Bhawan, Grand Road, Puri, Odisha. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
A reverse image search of key frames from the viral video led us to several social media posts by media outlets (here, here, and here) from June 2025, featuring the same video. This confirms that the video predates the ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’, which began on 17 August 2025, and is unrelated to the event. These posts stated that the video is from the Jagannath Rath Yatra held in Puri, Odisha, where hundreds of volunteers formed a human chain to allow an ambulance to pass through. The same video was also shared by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha’s X handle on 27 June 2025.
We noticed that in the background of these videos, the name ‘Bazaar Kolkata’ is visible. Using this as a clue, we traced the location on Google Maps and identified it as Town Mouza, Police Station, Senapati Bhawan, Grand Road, Puri, Odisha. The buildings in the video match those seen on Street View, as shown in the comparison below.
According to a news report (here, here), during the Jagannath Rath Yatra in Puri, many people fainted due to humidity and suffocation, leading to ambulances needing a clear path to provide medical help.
To sum up, the video of the crowd giving way to the ambulance at the 2025 Jagannath Rath Yatra in Puri is falsely shared as Bihar’s ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’.
