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| - Fact Check: 2019 video of Swachh Sabarmati mission shared as Hindus destroying idols during Covid
A misleading video on social media claims that after so many people died of Covid in India, Hindus lost faith in their religion and have started converting to Islam and destroying their idols.
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India Today Fact Check
The video is from Gujarat. As part of Swachh Sabarmati mission, residents of Ahmedabad in September 2019 did not immerse idols in Sabarmati river and kept them on the river bank. Authorities later deployed bulldozers to clean up the riverfront.
A video of a bulldozer removing dozens of Hindu idols has gone viral on social media with the claim that disillusioned with their Gods during the Covid-19 pandemic, Hindus have started destroying their idols and converting to Islam.
The Hindi voiceover along with the video translates to, “India is devastated due to Covid; humanity is dying. Hindus have started destroying their idols, saying if their Gods cannot protect them, what good are they. They say Quran has opened their eyes. Hindus say they make idols from this earth, but if they cannot help them, then what is their use? Hindus have come together and are accepting Islam. Now they are destroying their idols.”
A Facebook user named “Gayas Khan” had shared this video with a claim in Bengali, saying, “A day would come when everyone would realise that God can’t help us.”
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim along with the video to be misleading. The video was shot in Ahmedabad in Gujarat in 2019 when authorities of Amdavad Municipal Corporation (AMC) were cleaning the Sabarmati riverfront as part of the Swachh Sabarmati campaign.
The archived version of the claim can be seen here.
AFWA probe
Breaking the video into keyframes and then running a reverse image search on the InVID tool, we came across a video posted on YouTube by the Gujarati news channel “ABP Asmita”. The caption of the video, posted on August 11, 2019, reads, “Devotees kept idols of Dashama open on riverfront Ahmedabad”.
The background of this video looked similar in many ways to the video posted on Facebook.
Taking a cue from this, we then conducted a keyword search and found a fact check article by “The Times of India
I shared this one month ago.
Retweeting this in light of some out of context videos being circulated on social media. #Ahmedabad #SwachhBharat #SwachhSabarmati https://t.co/yxIR8L46zr — Vijay Nehra (@vnehra) September 9, 2019
The article, posted on September 9, 2019, says that a video of Dashama idols from Ahmedabad has been falsely shared on social media as Ganpati idols. Although we did not find the Facebook video in the article, a tweet by IAS and former AMC chairman Vijay Nehra was embedded here.
The background of the photographs Nehra used in his tweet looked similar to the viral video. So we scanned his Twitter handle and came across the viral video shared by a user in reply to Nehra’s tweet. This Twitter handle belongs to Sagar Savaliya, the editor-in-chief of “Gujarat Khabar” web portal.
Thanks pic.twitter.com/6kjucsnJTn — Sagar Savaliya (@sagarsavaliya05) August 11, 2019
Therefore, we may conclude that the viral video has no connection with the present Covid situation in India. The 2019 video is of Swachh Sabarmati mission.
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