A Delhi railway official said in January 2020 this station has no designated Muslim prayer space

  • This article is more than one year old.
  • Published on January 10, 2020 at 06:30
  • 3 min read
  • By AFP India

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Two photos of a roped off area at a railway station in Delhi have been shared thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter published in January 2020 alongside a claim they show a space cordoned off by Muslims for daily prayer. The claim is misleading; a top railway official told AFP in January 2020 that no specific space has been designated for Muslim prayer at the station in the photos; AFP also visited the specified platform this month and found no such designated prayer space.

The photos were published in this Facebook post on January 2, 2020. The post has been shared more than 240 times.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:

Screenshot of misleading Facebook post

The post’s Hindi-language caption translates to English as: "Muslims have captured a space of 50 yards by tying a rope between platform number 4 and 5 at the Old Delhi Railway Station and no one can go inside. This place is reserved for offering Islamic prayer and there are two-three trunks with ‘prayer related stuff inside and no one is allowed to sit on it’ written on them. Will the railway tell me under what law this place has been allotted to them? Are they intended to convert the railway platform into a mosque? This is an infiltration and it will go far if they were not removed from here.”

The photos in the misleading posts show a board which displays daily times allotted for Muslim prayer (namaz).

The post also tagged the verified Facebook pages of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of Railways and the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The photos have also been shared on Facebook here, here, here and here; and on Twitter here, here, here and here alongside a similar claim.

The claim is misleading; Munindra Kumar Chaudhary, the Old Delhi Railway Station’s Acting Superintendent, refuted the claim as “baseless” speculation and said the photos in the post may be “eight to nine years old.”

“This is absolutely baseless information and rumour,” Chaudhary told AFP during an interview on January 8, 2020 at his office. “There is no such place or space designated from any religious ritual inside the station premises. There is only a meditation room for security personnel and other railway staff.”

AFP also visited the platforms named in the misleading Facebook post and did not find any such encroachment. 

Below are photographs taken by AFP of the platform:

Photographs of the platform

AFP also found that the area photographed in the Facebook post now has metal benches fixed to the ground, another indication that the misleading photos were taken before this year. 

Below is a comparison showing the empty space and an old concrete bench seen in the misleading photo (L) and the new metal benches seen on the platform and photographed by AFP (R):

Image comparing screenshot

 

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