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| - Fact Check: This video is neither about Pakistan's economic crisis nor PoK secession movement
A video showing citizens in the Pakistan-administered region of Gilgit and Baltistan taking to the streets to protest against electricity prices, tax hikes, land grabs, and wheat shortages has gone viral. But the video has no connection with the inflation spiral in Pakistan or PoK's accession to India.
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India Today Fact Check
The viral video has no connection with the inflation in Pakistan or PoK's accession with India.
Food prices have reached an all-time high in Pakistan. As news and videos of Pakistani citizens queueing up and struggling over subsidised wheat leading to stampedes reached India, the social media on the other side of the border started flooding with bizarre claims.
A video purportedly shot in Pakistan has gone viral and those sharing it claimed it showed a protest from Gilgit-Balistan (Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir), which was organised to demand freedom from Pakistan and accession to India. Archived versions of such tweets can be seen here and here
In the video, a large number of people can be seen marching through a street and chanting, "Chalo Chalo Gilgit Chalo."
While the audio in the viral video is clear, the visuals are blurry. Many people took to Twitter to share the video with captions like, "This ocean of people gathered in #POJK to get freedom from Pak tyranny and demanding reunion with India!"
Notably, Steve Hanke, a Professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, also shared the video but linked it with the skyrocketing staple food prices and worsening economic situation in Pakistan.
AFWA's investigation found that while the viral video is from Gilgit in Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir, the people in it were not rallying to secede from Pakistan and reunite with India. The visuals are from a protest against the imposition of taxes on Gilgit-Baltistan’s residents which took place five years ago in the region.
AFWA Probe
To examine the authenticity of the video, we performed a reverse image search of the keyframes of the visuals. The reverse search led us to several media reports in Pakistani media and YouTube videos which matched the stills of the video under probe.
One such was a report that appeared in Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, titled "March against imposition of taxes begins in GB". The story from December 2017 said that strikes began on December 21, 2017, in ten districts of Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (POK) and sit-ins were organised in Skardu’s Yadgar Chowk and Gilgit’s Etihad Chowk.
Another report by ANI noted that widespread protests took place in Gilgit Baltistan against the ill-treatment of locals by Pakistan.
The report further stated that people organised the protests to call on the government to withdraw all taxes imposed in the region under the GB Adaptation Act 2012. The protests were called upon by the Anjiman-i-Tajran and the Awami Action Committee (AAC), and were backed by several political and religious parties in Baltistan.
To double-check our findings vis-a-vis the viral claim, we compared it with other clippings of the same protest. The reverse search took us to a YouTube channel "Gilgit Baltistan News". The video is titled "Skardu protest against tax imposition."
The viral video appears to be a bit zoomed out, which makes it look blurry. The length of the viral video, its location, and the levels of daylight all matched the five-year-old YouTube video. Then we matched all the key elements from both videos. All the vehicles present in the viral video, their positioning, and alignment in the street matched with the ones visible in the YouTube video.
Thus, it is beyond doubt that the viral video has no connection with the inflation spiral in Pakistan or PoK's accession to India.
(Written by Vikas Bhadauria)
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