Old photo of submerged India temple falsely linked to 2024 Bangladesh floods

"India opened their Dams, created floods. A mandir (Hindu temple) in Bangladesh is now under water," read a post on social media site X that included a picture of a temple whose courtyard was submerged in water.

It has been shared more than 700 times since it was posted on August 21, 2024.

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Screenshot of the false post taken on August 25, 2024

The post surfaced as Bangladesh grappled with severe floods that have killed at least 40 people and left nearly 300,000 taking refuge in emergency shelters (archived link).

The floods came less than three weeks after the ouster of former premier Sheikh Hasina, who was forced to flee by helicopter to India, her government's biggest political patron, during a student-led uprising.

She was replaced by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who is heading an interim government facing the monumental task of charting democratic reforms ahead of expected new elections.

Asif Mahmud, a leader of the student protests that ousted Hasina, and who is now in Yunus' caretaker cabinet, accused India of "creating a flood" by deliberately releasing water from dams.

India's foreign ministry rejected the charge, saying its own catchment area had experienced the "heaviest rains of this year" in the same week, and that the flow of water downstream was due to "automatic releases" (archived link).

Floods and landslides left more than 20 people dead in the northeastern Indian state of Tripura during the same period.

The photo of the Hindu temple in India has also been shared alongside similar claims on X and Facebook.

Misrepresented picture

A reverse image search on Google found the photo is old. It was flipped horizontally from a picture published by the English-language newspaper The Hindu on August 24, 2019 (archived link).

"The Kapil Muni temple on Sagar Island in the Sunderbans, where a large number of devotees gather every year during the Gangasagar fair, is facing the threat of rising seas and will be submerged in the next few years," the report read in part.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the circulating photo (left) and the picture published by The Hindu (right) with the matching features highlighted by AFP: 

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Screenshot comparison of the circulating photo (left) and the picture published by The Hindu (right)

The photo was also published by Indian news organisation Down to Earth on September 11, 2019 (archived link ). 

The Sundarbans region stretches from the southeastern part of West Bengal in India to the southern region of Bangladesh (archived link).

AFP was able to confirm the location of the Kapil Muni temple by conducting a search on Google Maps which shows corresponding street imagery in Sagar Island in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal (archived link).

Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the false posts (left) and its Google Maps street view (right) with features highlighted by AFP:

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Screenshot comparison of the photo in the false posts (left) and Google Maps imagery of the temple (right)

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