This footage actually shows a rally after the killing of militant Burhan Wani in 2016

This article is more than one year old.
Published on August 22, 2019 at 10:00
2 min read
By Supriya BATRA, AFP India

A video has been viewed thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook which claim it shows people in Kashmir defying a curfew to protest after the Indian government revoked the state’s semi-autonomous status. The claim is false; the video has circulated online for years in reports about protests after the death of a popular militant Burhan Wani in 2016.

The one-minute 20 seconds video was posted on a page in this Facebook post on August 7, 2019. It has been viewed about 154,000 times and shared more than 8,700 times since it was posted online.

The post’s Bengali-language caption translated to English states: “Despite the curfew in Kashmir, lakhs of people have gathered in the jansabha. Inshallah, Kashmir will secure victory.”

A lakh is a unit of measurement in the Indian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand.

“Inshallah” is an Arabic word used to express “God’s will” as described by Collin’s dictionary here.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:

Screenshot of the misleading post

In the video, a man can be heard shouting anti-India slogans and words like “Azadi” repeatedly. Azadi is an Urdu word that translates into English as freedom.

A large crowd can be seen and heard repeating sentences like “What we want is freedom from India” and “All we want is freedom.”

The Indian government on August 5, 2019, issued a presidential order to scrap Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status. The state has since been in lockdown, as described in this AFP report.

The same video and claim have been published repeatedly on Facebook, for example here and here.

The claim is false; the video actually shows a Muslim cleric, Sarjan Barkati, delivering a speech to a large gathering after the death of Burhan Wani, who was a commander of the Kashmiri separatist group, Hizbul Mujahideen, who died in July, 2016.

A reverse image search using screenshots obtained with the InVid tool found the misleading video clip had been edited from a longer 1:55 video published here on YouTube on September 20, 2016.

The 2016 video has a caption saying: “Sarjan Barkati in pro freedom rally”.

The footage matches the clip circulating in the misleading posts from 46 seconds onwards.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading posts (L) and YouTube video published in 2016 (R):

Another video of the same event shot from a different angle, where Barkati can be seen speaking, was published here on YouTube in September 2016.

Here is an AFP report dated July 9, 2016 about protests that broke out after Burhan Wani’s death.

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