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| - Fact Check: 2020 video shared with false claim that Muslims offered loud prayers on streets after clampdown on loudspeakers in UP
While we couldn't pinpoint the exact date on which the video was recorded, we concluded that this 2020 video from Howrah was definitely not in response to the recent clampdown on loudspeakers in UP.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is not from the UP, but from West Bengal's Howrah. It was shot in April 2020 following the 21-day first phase of the national lockdown, when all the places of worship were shut down.
Recently, the Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government ordered places of worship to lower the volumes of loudspeakers. Speakers were also removed from 125 places, as per the Additional Director General (Law and Order) of the UP Police. In its aftermath, a video of Muslim men standing on a road while offering prayers loudly went viral with the claim that this was in response to Adityanath’s orders.
A Sudarshan News journalist tweeted the video, asking if shouting prayers, as seen in the video, was an alternative to loudspeakers. The video was also shared by the official Sudarshan News Twitter account, at least twice.
The Sudarshan News Twitter account also called it an alternative to bans on loudspeakers. The news channel’s founder Suresh Chavhanke too shared the video with the same claim. The videos shared by all of them bore the Sudarshan News watermark.
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, .#BahutSaralHu pic.twitter.com/TpXl1Ri88j — Abhay Pratap Singh (@IAbhay_Pratap) April 25, 2022
The video was widely shared on Facebook as well.
Archived versions of these claims can be seen here and here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the video was almost two-year-old and was not from Uttar Pradesh but from Howrah in West Bengal.
AFWA Probe
A reverse search of keyframes of the video led us to a Tweet from April 19, 2020, where a person shared a screengrab from the same video uploaded to Facebook by someone named Nitin Thakur.
pic.twitter.com/RhEzb4IQgx — Asif.Amadi. (@asif_amadi) April 19, 2020
We then went through the feed of Nitin Thakur and came across a better quality of the viral video shared on April 17, 2020.
The same video was shared by another Twitter user on April 8, 2020. This proved the video was not recent.
Where is the video from?
In the video, we noticed white and blue pavement railings, something that’s a staple of the All India Trinamool Congress-led West Bengal government. A comparison with a photo of a Kolkata pavement railing carried by Ei Samay, a Bengali-language daily from the Times Group can be seen below.
We also noticed the signage of a Biryani Shop named "Shimla Biryani" written in Bangla in the video, hinting that this video was likely from West Bengal.
Dr. Rai confirmed to India Today that the viral video was from Pilkhana in Howrah. He explained that the video was from when all places of worship, including mosques, were shut down during the first 21-day phase of the national lockdown imposed to combat Covid-19.
While we couldn't pinpoint the exact date on which the video was recorded, we concluded that this 2020 video from Howrah was definitely not in response to the recent clampdown on loudspeakers in UP.
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