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| - Fact Check: 4-year-old video of Nupur Sharma viral as 'new statement' following Prophet controversy
India Today AFWA's investigation found that a four-year-old video of Nupur Sharma is going viral months after her remark on Prophet Muhammad sparked a row.
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India Today Fact Check
The viral video is four years old. It is part of Sharma’s speech delivered at a 2018 event in Maharashtra.
Almost two months have passed since former Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Nupur Sharma made controversial remarks on the Prophet Muhammad. From FIRs to court cases to violent protests to even gruesome murders allegedly linked to it, the story continues to dominate headlines. Now, a video of Sharma has been making the rounds with the claim that it captures her latest opinions, in the context of all that has happened.
In the video , Sharma questions whether calling oneself a Hindu was a crime? She was seen asking, “If you can call yourself Muslim, that is no crime. If you call yourself Christian, that is not a crime. Being Sikh is not a crime. Then why it is a crime to call yourself Hindu?” She also made statements on triple talaq and burqas.
AFWA’s investigation found that the video is four years old. It’s part of a speech Sharma delivered at a 2018 event in Maharashtra.
The viral posts have been archived here and here.
AFWA Probe
We searched for the last statement Sharma made on social media and found it was on June 5. In it, she unconditionally withdrew her comments and said she did not intend to hurt anyone’s religious sentiments. She had also reacted to the issue in an ABP News interview on May 29. However, aside from these two instances, we could not find any other statement or comment Sharma made following the controversy.
We then tried to look for the source of the viral video. A reverse search of the video’s frames led us to an old tweet from Sharma dated May 25, 2018. In it, she had shared photos of herself donning an outfit that looked similar to the one in the video.
She wrote in the caption that the photos were from an event called Vyakhyan organised by Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram at Nagar, Maharashtra. There she spoke on “Women in Nationalism”. She wrote, “It was also a privilege to have interacted with some very enterprising Nagar women who are contributing to the society in various ways.”
Spoke on “Women in Nationalism” at ‘Vyakhyan’ organised by Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram at Nagar, Maharashtra today.
It was also a privilege to have interacted with some very enterprising Nagar women who are contributing to the society in various ways. pic.twitter.com/6NYx5wSwoE — Nupur Sharma (@NupurSharmaBJP) May 24, 2018
Subsequent searches led us to a video of Sharma shared by a Facebook page called “ShivShakti Sangam” on May 24, 2018. In it, Sharma could be seen delivering a speech on a stage with banners on the backdrop. One of them contained the words “Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, Nagar” in Hindi.
In the 36-minute-long video, the contents of the viral clip can be seen at the 3.40 minutes mark.
We did not find a lot of details about the event online aside from the above mentioned video and Sharma’s tweet. However, seeing that it is from 2018, we concluded that the social media posts calling this a new statement are patently false.
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