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| - Fact Check: Muslim shrine in Hindu religious site? Lies spread through inflammatory video on Kurukshetra temple
The structure that was claimed to be a Muslim shrine was actually built by a Hindu family in the memory of an ancestor several years ago. Police refuted the claims of a Muslim shrine present there as well.
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India Today Fact Check
The structure showed in the video was built several years ago by a Hindu Brahmin family in the memory of an ancestor. It is not a Muslim shrine. Police, too, have called the claims baseless.
A video shot at the Gita Updesh Sthali in Kurukshetra, Haryana, made waves on social media recently. The video featured a man who made alarming claims about how Muslims were trying to take over the Hindu religious site, believed to be the site where Lord Krishna taught Arjuna about the tenets of the Bhagavad Gita. He claimed that Muslims even constructed a “mazaar” or a shrine there.
The man in the video showed a structure he claimed was the Muslim shrine. It was covered in a blue cloth that had the numbers “786” printed on it alongside text in Hindi that read, “Jai Peer Baabe di,” or glory to the Peer Baba. The man in the video alleged that this was a conspiracy by Muslims to take over the sacred Hindu site.
Throughout the video, he urged Hindus to share the video so that authorities could be alerted to this development and action could be taken against it. He repeatedly called it a Muslim conspiracy and claimed it was the duty of “true Hindus” to oppose this.
This video was shared not only across social media — especially on Facebook and WhatsApp — but was also shared by Sudarshan News on its social media. The news channel’s official Twitter account wrote, “Land Jihad in Kurukshetra? a shrine built on the spot where Lord Krishna preached the Gita to Arjuna? Is this a conspiracy to capture the holy Hindu pilgrimage site?”
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, .. !!
?@mlkhattar @anilvijminister pic.twitter.com/4He9Ig1zvG — Sudarshan News (@SudarshanNewsTV) May 8, 2022
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found these claims were patently false. The structure that was claimed to be a Muslim shrine was actually built by a Hindu family in the memory of an ancestor several years ago. Police refuted the claims of a Muslim shrine present there as well.
AFWA Probe
We began by making sure the location in the video was the Gita Updesh Sthali in Kurukshetra, Haryana. Photos uploaded to Google Maps matched the sights seen in the video.
Having made sure that the video was from the Gita Updesh Sthali, we reached out to the local police to verify if there was indeed a Muslim shrine in the Hindu religious site. Kurukshetra’s Deputy Commissioner Mukul Kumar, an IAS officer, spoke to India Today and said that claims of a Muslim shrine at the location were “baseless”. He also said that the structure in question was more than 30 years old and was built by a Hindu family in honour of an ancestor.
When we sent this video to Kurukshetra DSP Subhas Chandra, who also confirmed that the structure in question had nothing to do with Muslims or Islam. He said, “This rumour was triggered by mischievous elements who placed a cloth with ‘786’ and ‘Jai Peer Baabe di’ written on it. When we investigated, we found that the structure was built by a Brahmin family in a nearby village in the memory of an ancestor. But the matter is still under investigation.”
The man making the claims
While investigating the claim, we came across a May 10 Dainik Jagran report on the same issue that quoted a man called Dr. Naresh Bhardwaj. When we got in touch with Dr. Bhardwaj and showed him the video, he dismissed the claims and sent us a video of a man who resembled the man in the viral video. He said that this was likely the same man who spread the rumours of the Muslim shrine at the Gita Updesh Sthali.
We compared the two videos and concluded that the men in both videos sounded and looked like each other. We then reverse searched Dr. Bhardwaj’s video and found the social media accounts of a man called Narayan Sharma, who per his Facebook profile
We also found the viral video was first shared on a Facebook page called “Bhakti Ras” by the user @sharmanarayan123. It has now been deleted. While we could not be sure of it, it appeared that the video shared by Sudarshan News came from here.
On his Instagram account @bhakti_marg_123, where he has more than 46,000 followers, Sharma shared a video on April 22 where he was seen in the same attire as the man in the viral video. We again noted the resemblance the two shared, including a mole on the face.
We, however, were not able to independently verify that it was Sharma who made the now-viral claims about the alleged Muslim shrine.
The contentious structure
To get to the bottom of the Muslim shrine claim, we contacted Vinod Sharma, a member of the family that constructed the structure at the Gita Updesh Sthali. Sharma, who lives in the nearby Jyotisar village and works at the Kurukshetra Sub-Divisional Magistrate’s office, told India Today that his family had constructed the structure several years ago.
“Following the rumours of it being a Muslim shrine, our family was very affected,” he said. “When things escalated, we shifted the ‘bhorkha’ from the Gita Updesh Sthali to our farm.”
A “bhorkha”, as per Jay Narayan Sharma of the Shri Brahmin Evam Tirthodhar Sabha, is a tradition among Hindu families in Haryana. It is usually constructed in the memory of those who die before getting married. These structures are usually placed in the front yards of homes.
So, while we weren’t able to identify with certainty the man who made the claims, we were able to conclude that the claims in the video were patently false. The structure seen in the video was not a Muslim shrine. It was a Hindu shrine built by a Brahmin family from a nearby village.
(With inputs from Yash Mittal)
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