This video of Chinese and Indian troops shows two separate incidents which predate the June 2020 clash
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on June 24, 2020 at 10:30
- 3 min read
- By AFP India
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The footage was shared on Facebook here on June 19, 2020. It has been viewed more than 3,000 times since.
The four-minute 49-second video consists of two clips: the first clip shows troops embroiled in a heated discussion in English and Mandarin in a mountainous region; the second clip shows a scuffle between several uniformed troops.
The Facebook post's caption reads: “Last video of Col.Santhosh Babu trying to pacify Chinese soldiers.Even while he was talking, Chinese soldiers bullied him.”
According to the Indian Army, Colonel Bikumalla Santosh Babu was one of at least 20 Indian soldiers killed on June 15 in a fatal clash with Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley, which lies along the Chinese-Indian border.
The confrontation marked the first deadly incident in a long-running border dispute between the two countries in decades, AFP reported here.
The video was shared alongside a similar claim here and here on Facebook.
Regional Telugu-language TV news channels in India also posted the video alongside similar claims on YouTube here and here. The videos gained combined views of nearly 2.5 million.
The claim, however, is misleading; both clips shared in the misleading posts circulated online long before Colonel Babu was killed in June 2020.
First video
The first clip was published on YouTube here on January 13, 2020, several months before the deadly Galwan Valley incident.
The video shows a Chinese soldier arguing with Indo Tibetan Border Police in the northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, according to the YouTube post. Arunachal Pradesh is over 3,000 km from the Galwan Vally, as seen on Google Maps here.
AFP debunked a similar misleading claim about the video here in May 2020.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the first clip in the video in the misleading post (L) and the YouTube video from in January 2020 (R):
Second video
A reverse image search on Google with video keyframes extracted using InVID-WeVerify, a digital verification tool, found the second clip was published here on July 7, 2017, nearly three years before the June 2020 incident.
The video, uploaded to the verified YouTube channel of Indian newspaper Deccan Herald, is titled: “Watch: Jawans stop Chinese soldiers from entering Indian territory part 1.”
Below are screenshot comparisons of the footage video in the misleading post (L) and the Deccan Herald video from July 2017 (R):
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