Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Claim
A spate of Twitter accounts, some of them verified, are sharing a video that shows idols of Hindu gods being bulldozed along what appears to be an embankment, claiming it to be in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
One user tweeted “When a bulldozer is run on the idols of Mata Rani by the BJP administration on the banks of the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad…Sentiments of any Hindu are not hurt.” Another user rhetorically asked in Hindi “what if this had happened in a non-BJP ruled state?”
Several users also shared the same video, with Hindi captions along the same lines.
Archived versions of the posts can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Fact Check
Newshecker first did a reverse image search of key frames of the video, which led us to the earliest instance of this video being tweeted by one Sagar Savaliya on August 11, 2019. The user tweeted the video in response to a post by the then Ahmedabad municipal commissioner, Vijay Nehra, on the same day, lauding the clean-up of the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad. “Something amazing is happening in #Ahmedabad today. Ordinary citizens have decided to keep #Sabarmati river clean. Instead of immersing Dashama idols in the river, they have respectfully left them on the banks!! Thousands and Thousands of them. Unbelievable change,” Nehra had tweeted.
Archived version of the post can be seen here.
On researching further, we found another tweet by Nehra, where he clarified that the idols were not immersed in the river by people to cooperate with the Swacch Sabarmati mission.
The image search also brought us to several fact-checks by other organisations, including Newschecker, from May 2021, when the same video was shared with a different claim, which alleged that Hindus were destroying idols of their Gods as they were disillusioned with their religion amid the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Result: Missing context
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
