Tourist misidentified as Bill Gates at India holy site

Published on February 6, 2025 at 07:37
3 min read
By Akshita KUMARI, AFP India

Celebrities from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin to US actress Dakota Johnson have reportedly joined millions of pilgrims at India's Kumbh Mela mega-festival, but a video shared online apparently showing billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates visiting a nearby holy site during the event is misleading. The man who shot the footage, which was in fact filmed before Kumbh Mela, said the man was a tourist. A spokesperson for the Gates Foundation confirmed the Microsoft mogul was not the man in the clip.

"A global icon at a spiritual landmark!" celebrity news page "PinkVilla" posted to its 5.9 million Facebook followers on January 15.

"Bill Gates was spotted at the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir during the Maha Kumbh, adding an international touch to this sacred occasion."

The video shows a grey-haired man in glasses looking into the distance.

Kashi Vishwanath is a temple dedicated to Hindu deity Shiva in the northern Indian city of Varanasi, around 120 kilometres (75 miles) from Prayagraj, the site of Kumbh Mela (archived link).

Some 400 million pilgrims are expected to attend the millennia-old sacred show of religious piety and ritual bathing held once every 12 years at the site where the holy Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers meet (archived link).

Coldplay singer Chris Martin, "Fifty Shades of Grey" star Dakota Johnson and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, have all reportedly attended the festival (archived here and here).

The world's largest religious gathering is no stranger to deadly crowd incidents, and a stampede on January 29 killed at least 30 people (archived link).

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on January 20, 2025

The video was shared by Indian Facebook and X accounts with tens of thousands of followers.

'He is Bill Gates!'

However, a reverse image search of the video on Google found it was previously posted online in December 2024 -- two months before Kumbh Mela began (archived link).

It was shared in a YouTube video titled: "World richest man bill gates duplicate in kashi."

The man recording the video can be heard laughing while saying in Hindi: "Guess who this person is. He is Bill Gates!"

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video shared in false posts (left) and the YouTube video (right):

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

The owner of the YouTube channel Dipankar Yadav confirmed he filmed the video in Varanasi in November 2024.

"I saw a group of foreigners standing on a parapet near Manikarnika Ghat by the River Ganges and one of them resembled Bill Gates," he told AFP.

"So, for fun, I made the video and later shared it on YouTube."

Thousands of Hindu faithful travel to the Manikarnika Ghat cremation site in Varanasi every year to spend their final days.

Dying beside the banks of the Ganges guarantees they will be cremated there and their ashes scattered in the water along the river's steps or "ghats", which Hindus believe ensures liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

The group of tourists was not accompanied by security guards, Yadav added.

A spokesperson for the Gates Foundation confirmed to AFP that the man pictured was not Gates.

While the billionaire travelled to India in February 2024, when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, AFP found no news reports that he attended the 2025 edition of Kumbh Mela (archived link).

AFP has fact-checked more misinformation about the festival here.

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