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| - Fact Check: Bangladeshi actress Nazifa Tushi did not convert to Hinduism, fake Twitter account spreads lies
Let's take a look at the shady Twitter account impersonating the Bangladeshi actress and claiming that she has converted to Hinduism.
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India Today Fact Check
Nazifa Tushi, a Bangladeshi actress, told AFWA that she does not have a Twitter account. Nor has she converted to Hinduism.
A Bengali actress who allegedly “left Islam and adopted Sanatan Dharma”, said she is not afraid of “fatwas” if social media posts are to be believed. Screenshots of tweets from the account of “Nazifa Tushi” proclaiming, “No fatwa can change my mind, Har Har Mahadev,” and, “After leaving Islam, feeling blessed in Sanatan Dharma,” have been making the rounds on social media alongside these claims. One of these tweets contained a photo of a woman and a child, both sporting “tilaks” on their foreheads.
We also found the tweets visible in the screenshots, from February 27, 2023, and August 22, 2022. The archived version of these tweets can be seen here and here.
But did she do or say any of these things? AFWA found that neither has Bangladeshi actress Nazifa Tushi converted to Hinduism nor does she own the Twitter account in question.
Who is Nazifa Tushi?
Nazifa is a renowned Bangladeshi actress, recently seen in the famous Bangladeshi movie “Hawa”. Tushi was widely praised for her performance in the film.
We first searched for news related to Tushi converting to Hinduism. However, we found no news reports about this from either India or Bangladesh. To get to the bottom of this, AFWA contacted Tushi.
She categorically told us that she did not have a Twitter account. She provided us with links to her official social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
We also compared the photo of the woman sporting the “tilak” with photos from Tushi’s social media accounts and found no resemblance.
We used Facecheck to find the person in the viral image. This led us to the Instagram account "bhakti_kids_cdm". There, we noticed several posts featuring the same woman. The Instagram account, tagged in these posts, belonged to Gourangi Gandharvika Devi Dasi. On this account, we found the viral photo, shared on February 25.
Tushi also denied allegations of religious conversion. She told AFWA, "I belong to a Bangladeshi Muslim family, and have not converted to Hinduism."
The mysterious Twitter account
Every Twitter account has a unique ID number that remains the same even if the account’s handle has been changed. Using TweetBeaver , we found the Twitter ID number of the handle “@Nazifa_Tusi”.
When we searched for the ID on Yandex, we found that the same Twitter account was earlier active as "@Mahadev_Bhakt9", "@Charanjit_99" (impersonating Charanjit Singh Channi, the former chief minister of Punjab), and "@Shubham9_IND" (impersonating IAS officer Shubham Kumar). The last one was caught spreading misinformation earlier and was investigated by Boom in 2021.
We also found tweets in which a person had addressed “@Nazifa_Tusi” as "@Charanjit_99" and "@Shubham9_IND".
We used Twitonomy to examine the account and found that it was created on November 30, 2014. When we checked on the Wayback Machine, we found that the earliest archived tweet from this account was from August 10, 2022.
Curiously, Twitonomy, which examines a maximum of up to 3,200 of a user's most recent tweets, found that the account had only tweeted 190 times since August 9, 2022. This implied that previous tweets from this account had likely been scrubbed.
(With inputs from Shahidul Hasan Khokan in Bangladesh)
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