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| - Fact Check: Man in viral video inside polling booth is from TMC and not BJP
The video is from Islampur in West Bengal and the man seen in the white kurta is a local Trinamool leader.
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India Today Fact Check
The man was not BJP MLA Anil Upadhyay, but a TMC leader from Islampur in West Bengal.
Bang in the middle of Lok Sabha elections, a video of a man walking about inside a polling booth directing voters at the EVM has gone viral.
A Facebook page called 'IT & Social Media Cell Congress' claimed that the person in the video was BJP MLA Anil Upadhyay.
India Today's Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found this claim to be wrong. The video is from Islampur in West Bengal and the man seen in the white kurta is a local Trinamool leader.
The post on 'IT & Social Media Cell Congress' has been shared over 500 times. Other Facebook users have also shared the same post.
The background audio in the two-minute video has been deliberately altered to sound confusing. Looking at the video closely, we found there are "No Smoking" posters on the wall that are written in Bengali and English.
To pursue this clue further, we searched social media and found some people had shared a different narrative for the same video. They claimed "TMC workers" were directing voters inside a polling booth in West Bengal.
TMC workers are dictating the voters to vote in their favor right inside polling booth in West Bengal
Imagine if this was a BJP worker
"SAVIORS of DEMOCRACY"
would be on the road shouting
"DEATH of DEMOCRACY"
Where is Pappu, what are his views on this?pic.twitter.com/s3R7nnPE6b Chowkidar Mahesh Vikram Hegde (@mvmeet) April 21, 2019
We searched through some prominent Bengali media with the combination of regional key words such as 'EVM', 'TMC', 'Viral Video', etc. and found that ETV Bharat had first published this news on April 19.
This Bengali news report said that according to unconfirmed reports, the man in the white kurta directing voters in the polling booth could be Islampur panchayat member Hamizuddin.
The second report published by ETV Bharat on April 20 confirmed that the man in the video in the white kurta was Hamizuddin.
In an interview with ETV Bharat, the man confessed that he had gone inside the booth and "helped people to vote". This was on the day the phase 2 elections were held.
In one of its reports, Boom Live debunked the claim as well.
A few weeks ago, AFWA had debunked another fake claim involving 'MLA Anil Upadhyay of Madhya Pradesh' that went viral on social media.
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