Video of workers at Bangladesh river crossing falsely linked to India's voter roll revision
- Published on December 9, 2025 at 09:48
- 2 min read
- By Devesh MISHRA, AFP India
As India launched a revision of its voter rolls, checking eligible voters were enrolled and ensuring ineligible voters were removed, a video was shared in posts claiming it showed illegal Bangladeshi migrants fleeing the country to avoid questioning and detention. The footage was in fact filmed at a river in southern Bangladesh that a local newspaper said nearly 200,000 people traverse on their way to work every day.
The video, showing a wooden jetty crowded with people waiting to board small boats, was shared on Facebook on November 9, 2025.
Its Hindi-language caption says it shows an area of India's West Bengal state near the border with Bangladesh.
"After the arrival of SIR, the infiltrators are fleeing to Bangladesh," it adds, referring to the Special Intensive Revision -- a three-month exercise to revise voter rolls in the world's largest democracy -- and claims that undocumented Muslim migrants from Bangladesh have fraudulently registered as voters (archived link).
The exercise aims to ensure all eligible voters are included on the electoral rolls, while ineligible voters are struck off, ahead of local elections in several states and territories including West Bengal.
Local media reported that hundreds of Bangladeshi migrants were stranded at the border while fleeing India, allegedly because of the electoral roll revision and fears they would be detained if they failed to satisfy stringent documentation requirements (archived here and here).
The video was also shared alongside similar claims on Facebook and Instagram.
But the circulating video was filmed at a river crossing within Bangladesh and not at the West Bengal border (archived link).
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to similar footage shared on Facebook on October 20 (archived link).
Its Bengali-language caption reads: "This morning's scene of crossing the Mongla River. Every day, thousands of labourers, brothers and sisters, struggle to cross the river".
The Facebook user, Md Kamrul Islam Sumon, frequently shares videos of the same jetty (archived link).
He told AFP that the video was filmed at the Mongla Ferry Ghat, a maritime hub in the southern part of Bangladesh.
"The people seen in the video are workers of the Mongla Export Processing Zone (EPZ). They take small boats from the Ferry Ghat to go to work and come back home," he said on November 13.
According to a Bangladeshi news article from November 11, which features a similar image, nearly 200,000 people use the deteriorating jetties at the Mongla river crossing to go to work every day (archived link).
The rickety wooden jetty can be seen on Google Street View imagery of the river crossing within Bangladesh (archived link).
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