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| - Fact Check: This skinny wrestler defeating beefy opponent is a Pakistani athlete, NOT Bageshwar Baba
Social media users shared a video of a wrestling match and falsely claimed that the winner was Dhirendra Shastri, a self-styled godman.
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India Today Fact Check
The winning wrestler in the video is Ghulam Hussain Pathan, a Malakhra athlete from Sindh, Pakistan.
Dhirendra Shastri, a self-styled godman has been making headlines ever since anti-superstitious organisations challenged him to prove his miraculous powers. The internet has since been divided over Shastri's alleged ability to read minds, with devotees posing faith in his supposed miracles, and anti-superstition activists calling him a fraud.
Amid all this, a video of a wrestling match surfaced online with claims that one of the wrestlers was Shastri. The video shared on Twitter claimed that the winning wrestler was Shastri, also popularly known as "Bageshwar Baba".
In the 17-second-long video, a wrestler wearing an orange loincloth was seen trouncing a much more muscular and bigger wrestler clad in a white loincloth. A Twitter user, while sharing this video, wrote, "Bageshwar Dham Baba Shri Dhirendra Krishna Shastri Ji in the wrestling ring.” The claim also made its way to Facebook.
AFWA’s investigation found that the winning wrestler in the video was not Shastri, but Pakistani wrestler Ghulam Hussain Pathan.
AFWA Probe
A reverse search of the video’s keyframes led us to a Pakistani YouTube channel called "Sachal TV" that hosted a similar video of a wrestling match. This video was about two minutes and 19 seconds long, and also showed a skinny wrestler in orange pinning down his beefy opponent in white. The video was titled, “New Sindhi malakhra Ghulam Hussain Pathan”, and was uploaded to YouTube on November 6, 2020. Malakhra or Malakhro is a traditional form of wrestling in Sindh, Pakistan.
We compared the viral video with this one and found that the viral clip only showed the final few seconds of the same match and was also cropped to a vertical orientation.
We checked the YouTube channel further and found it contained several other videos of the same wrestler, who was identified as Ghulam Hussain Pathan. Subsequent searches led us to Pathan's own YouTube channel. Here too, we found several videos of Pathan taking on other wrestlers.
We also found a February 2020 interview with Pathan on the YouTube channel called "NTV News HD”. In the video, he said that he had been wrestling since the age of 14 and was one of the youngest wrestlers in Sindh. On further probe, we also found his Facebook profile, where he often uploads his wrestling videos.
Thus, the evidence before us clearly debunks the viral tweet claiming that the winning wrestler was Dhirendra Shastri. The saffron-loinclothed wrestler is in fact a Pakistani wrestler called Ghulam Hussain Pathan.
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