Pro-India parade filmed in Gujarat state, not Pakistan
- Published on May 30, 2025 at 11:01
- 3 min read
- By Sachin BAGHEL, AFP India
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"RSS marches in Balochistan. You must have heard the name RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh," reads a Hindi-language X post on May 20, 2025, referring to the group that is the ideological fountainhead of India's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (archived link).
"These days it has become active in Balochistan, see," the post adds. Its featured footage shows a group of people holding Indian flags and banners, marching through a street.
Similar posts surfaced on Facebook after the BJP launched a national flag campaign called "Tiranga Yatra" to highlight New Delhi's recent military action against Islamabad (archived link).
India carried out airstrikes that it said targeted "terror camps" inside Pakistan in early May in response to an attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir which New Delhi blames on its neighbour. Islamabad denies the charge (archived link).
The conflict that ensued killed 70 people on both sides and pushed the nuclear-armed neighbours to brink of a war before an unexpected truce halted the fighting (archived link).
However, there have been no official reports following the crisis of the RSS staging a pro-India march in Pakistan's Balochistan province, where attacks by separatist groups have soared in the past few years (archived link).
The video in the posts has been misrepresented.
A reverse image search using keyframes led to the same video uploaded on YouTube on May 17, 2025. Its description says the visuals show a "Tiranga Yatra" march in Gujarat's Surat city (archived link).
According to a report from The Indian Express newspaper, the parade happened on May 14 and saw attendees playing patriotic songs and holding up placards hailing Indian soldiers (archived link).
Banners visible in the clip are written in the Gujarati language and a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hails from the Indian state, could be seen at the 24-second mark.
Using shop signs as clues, AFP was able to confirm the location of the footage by comparing its visuals with Google Maps street imagery of a road in Surat (archived link).
AFP has debunked other misinformation stemming from the India-Pakistan conflict here.
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