This video has circulated since 2017 and shows attendees at a funeral for a Congress political party member

This article is more than one year old.
Published on January 24, 2020 at 09:30
2 min read
By AFP India

Footage of men distributing items to a queue of women in India has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter alongside claims that the video shows women being paid for protesting against India’s controversial new citizenship law by the opposition Indian National Congress party. The claim is false; the video has circulated online since 2017 -- some three years before the protests against the citizenship law broke out; a Congress spokesperson told AFP that the footage actually shows attendees at a religious funeral service for a party member in Manipur in 2017.

The video was shared in this Facebook post on January 17, 2020. It has since been viewed more than 470,000 times and shared over 26,000 times.

The post’s Hindi caption translates to English as: "All the women are receiving money for freedom from Congress workers on the spot".

Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:

Screenshot of misleading Facebook post

The post was shared two days after an unverified video, alleging female participants at Delhi's Shaheen Bagh protest demonstration were being paid 500 rupees per day to protest, was shared by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's head of social media Amit Malviya.

Hundreds of grandmothers, housewives and students have been sittting and sleeping across the main road in the Shaheen Bagh district of Delhi, fighting the country's new citizenship law. Here is an AFP report on the situation.

The new law, approved December 2019, was spearheaded by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

AFP has debunked multiple pieces of disinformation about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) – for example, here, here and here.

The claim about footage showing women queueing to receive payment is another example of content being shared in a misleading context.

The video was also published alongside the same claim here, here, here and here on Facebook and here, here and here on Twitter.

A reverse Google image search of keyframes extracted from the video using InVID, a digital verification tool, found the same clip published here on YouTube on March 2, 2017, nearly three years before protests began against India’s new citizenship law.

The video’s description alleges that the footage shows Congress party workers “bribing voters with money” in Manipur.

However, Congress told AFP that the video shows a religious rite at a funeral in 2017 for a party member in Manipur.

“Distributing money on deaths or marriages is a part of rituals in Manipuri culture, but this is unfortunate that the video has been circulated to claim that the Congress is bribing the people for anti-CAA protests,” Ningombam Bupenda Meitei, a party spokesperson from Manipur, said by phone on January 21, 2020.

People in the video can also be heard speaking Meitei, the local language of Manipur, and several are wearing Congress flags and apparel.

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail