Video of old monk falsely linked to India's Kumbh Mela mega-festival

Published on February 4, 2025 at 08:37
3 min read
By Akshita KUMARI, AFP India

India's Kumbh Mela festival attracts tens of millions of Hindu faithful to Prayagraj in northern Uttar Pradesh state, but footage of an elderly monk making an offering at a shrine that circulated online is unrelated. The clip was filmed in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, while local media reported the monk died weeks before the world's biggest religious gathering began on January 13, 2025.

"A 154-year-old monk who came from the Himalayan mountains to participate in the Maha Kumbh Mela," read a Facebook post from January 25 that showed a clip of a crowd watching an elderly monk at a Hindu shrine.

Hindi text overlaid on the clip reads: "154-year-old monk".

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on January 25, 2025

The video surfaced with similar claims on X and Instagram as pilgrims from across India and beyond -- expected to reach around 400 million -- take part in the Kumbh Mela running from January 13 to February 26.

The millennia-old sacred show of religious piety is held every 12 years in Prayagraj at the site where the holy Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers meet (archived link).

The ritual of bathing in the holy rivers is often led by a group of holy men, and then followed by thousands of pilgrims.

With its unfathomable throngs of devotees, the festival has a grim track record of deadly crowd crushes. On January 29, a chaotic pre-dawn crowd surge killed at least 30 people (archived link).

Unrelated footage

The circulating video of the old man, however, was not filmed during the Kumbh Mela as the false posts claimed.

A reverse image search on Google of the video's keyframes found it posted on YouTube on September 13, 2024 by a channel called "Viken Kushwah Official" (archived link).

"Don't know in which form God will be found," the Hindi-language video caption read.

Screenshot comparison of the video in the false post (left) and the YouTube video (right)

AFP reached out to the YouTube channel's owner Viken Kushwah, who identified the monk as Siyaram Baba (archived link).

Kushwah described himself as a devotee of Siyaram Baba and has shared hundreds of videos of him with his 1.4 million subscribers (archived link).

He said he filmed the footage in the monk's monastery on the banks of the Narmada River in Khargone district of central Madhya Pradesh state.

AFP confirmed the location of the video by comparing a shrine seen in the clip to an image of the monastery geotagged on Google Maps (archived link).

Screenshot comparison between a scene from the YouTube video (left) and an image geotagged on Google Maps (right) with the same shrine highlighted by AFP

While AFP was not able to independently verify the monk's age, the Times of India reported that he died on December 11, 2024 aged 94 (archived link).

AFP previously debunked a wave of misinformation around Kumbh Mela.

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