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| - Fact Check: Picture of burqa-clad students passed off as Kerala's all-women police force
The burqa-clad women were college students and not in the police.
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India Today Fact Check
The picture was taken at an Arabic college in Kerala’s Kasaragod district in 2017. The man in the photo was then district police chief KG Simon. The burqa-clad women were college students and not in the police.
Is the all-women police force in Kerala now clad in burqa? This is the claim that is circulating on social media along with a picture of a police officer posing with a group of women in traditional Muslim attire.
Several Twitter and Facebook users have posted the image with communal undertones. The caption in Hindi translates to, “Don’t be surprised. This is not Saudi Arabia but the all-women police force in Kerala. Hindus, keep sleeping”.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that the picture was taken at an Arabic college in Kerala’s Kasaragod district in 2017. The man in the photo was then the district police chief KG Simon. The burqa-clad women were college students and not in the police.
The archived versions of the posts can be seen here, here and here.
Truth about the photo
Using reverse search, we traced the picture to a report by “The New Indian Express” published on October 24, 2017.
The picture had created quite a stir on social media then, when a Kerala lawyer named C Shukkur posted it on Facebook. As per the report, the girls in burqa seen in the photograph were students of an Arabic college at Uliyathaduka in Kasaragod district of Kerala and the police officer in uniform standing in the middle was KG Simon, the then district police chief.
India Today contacted the police officer who confirmed that he was a guest at an event organised at an education institute in Kasaragod in 2017. “Since it was a Muslim institute, that was the uniform of the students. They were not women police personnel but students,” Simon told AFWA.
In 2017, fact-check website “BOOM Live” published a story, when many doubted the authenticity of the viral photograph.
With the highest sex ratio, Kerala has the country’s first women police battalion. But the claim that they are clad in burqa is false.
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