A post accompanying aerial footage of a large gathering of people is being shared with a claim that the visuals show Muzaffarnagar Mahapanchayat which was organised by the farmers protesting the new farm laws. Let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Visuals of large crowd gathering at the Muzaffarnagar Mahapanchayat organised by the protesting farmers.
Fact: These visuals actually show large crowd attending the funeral procession of Pakistani cleric Khadim Rizvi back in 2020. Multiple news agencies published similar visuals attributing them to the cleric’s funeral. Though the kisan Mahapanchayat saw the participation of a large number of people, the visuals of the viral video have nothing to do with this panchayat. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Reverse image search of the screenshots of the video led us to a similar video on YouTube. As per the description, these are the drone visuals of Pakistani cleric Khadim Rizvi’s funeral.
Taking a cue from the YouTube video, further search with relevant keywords led us to Pakistan-based news agencies reports which published the visuals of Khadim Rizvi’s funeral procession. In this video from the 7:18 timestamp, the visuals are exactly similar to the viral video. From this, we can infer that the viral video is extracted from this news report.
Further Google search with relevant keywords yielded multiple news articles (here, here, and here) which published images similar to the visuals of the video. As per one such news article, the image shows ‘activists and supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) gathering for the funeral prayer of Khadim Hussain Rizvi, founder of TLP, in Lahore on November 21, 2020’.
Earlier this month, farmers organizations protesting against the three farm laws organised a Kisan Mahapanchayat in Uttar Pradesh’ Muzaffarnagar. Although people from different parts of the country attended the panchayat, the viral video in the post is not related to this panchayat organised by the protesting farmers.
To sum it up, drone visuals of Pakistani cleric Khadim Rizvi’s funeral are passed off as those from Kisan Mahapanchayat in Muzaffarnagar.
