Image shows street in Bangladesh, not road in Kashmir renovated ahead of G20 meeting

This article is more than one year old.
Published on May 31, 2023 at 09:16
3 min read
By Uzair RIZVI, AFP India

An image of a colourfully painted, brightly lit street has been shared on social media platforms alongside false claims the road is in Indian-administered Kashmir and was renovated ahead of a G20 tourism meeting there in May 2023. But the picture corresponds to Google Street View imagery of a street in a southern Bangladesh town, and the photographer who took it told AFP the image is unrelated to the G20 meeting.

"Boulevard Road, leading to the venue for G20 Meeting in Srinagar given new look to welcome the delegates from across the world," reads the caption of the photo shared on Twitter on May 19, 2023.

The photo circulated ahead of the start of a three-day G20 tourism meeting in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, on May 22.

AFP reported the meeting was held under tight security, with India seeking to project an image of normality in a region wracked for decades by violence.

Questions have been raised over the choice of location in the disputed Muslim-majority territory, which is split between New Delhi and Islamabad, both of whom claim it in full.

Non-G20 member Pakistan, which controls a much smaller part of Kashmir, accused India of "arrogance" and violating international law by holding the meeting in the territory, triggering a sharp retort from New Delhi.

India also rejected comments from the UN special rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes, who said New Delhi was seeking to use the G20 meeting to "portray an international seal of approval" on a situation that "should be decried and condemned".

Screenshot of the false tweet, captured on May 25, 2023

The photo has also been shared alongside the same claim elsewhere on Twitter here and here, as well as on Facebook.

Comments from some users suggested they believed the photo was taken in Srinagar.

"Beautiful Kashmir, long live India," one commented.

Another wrote: "Developing Srinagar."

But the photo was in fact taken in Bangladesh.

Street in Patuakhali, Bangladesh

A reverse image search on Google found the photo was uploaded on February 3 to the Facebook page Mobigraphers -- a page for photographers in Bangladesh (archived link).

Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the false tweet (left) and the photo as it appears in the post on the Facebook page (right):

Screenshot comparison of the photo in the false tweet (left) and the photo as it appears in the post on the Mobigraphers Facebook page (right)

The image's Bengali-language caption translates as "Who do you want to walk with?", and is accompanied by the name of the photographer, Zahidul Islam Sajid.

Sajid, who is also the owner of the Mobigraphers Facebook page, told AFP the photo was not taken in Srinagar (archived link).

"I took the photo in Patuakhali (a southern town of Bangladesh) in February. It was around 1 am when I took the photo and the weather was a little foggy. I posted the photo on my Facebook page 'Mobigraphers' and then some other pages shared it without my name," he said on May 23.

Other photos from the same location were also uploaded to the Mobigraphers page on January 27 (archived link). And a video of the same street was uploaded to Facebook on May 18 in a post identifying it as being in Patuakhali (archived link).

Google Street View imagery of the street also corresponds to the image being shared online alongside the false claim (archived link).

Meanwhile, video and images taken along Boulevard Road in Srinagar show it looks significantly different to the street in Patuakhali, and runs for much of its length along the shore of a large lake (archived links here and here).

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail