This video has circulated in Indian news reports since at least 2014

This article is more than one year old.
Published on June 15, 2020 at 09:00
2 min read
By AFP India

A video has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim it shows a dispute between Chinese and Indian troops in India’s Ladakh region. The posts were published in May 2020, when China and India became involved in a fresh round of face-offs in Ladakh, over their non-demarcated frontier. The claim is misleading; the video has circulated online in Indian news reports since at least 2014.

The video was published here on Facebook on May 29, 2020. It has been viewed more than 20,000 times.

The four-minute 55-second footage shows a standoff between troops in a mountainous area.

(Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post)

The post's Hindi-language caption translates to English as: “Tensions have started at the Ladakh border area, China is provoking India for a war.”

In early May 2020, clashes broke out between Chinese and Indian troops in India’s Ladakh region, resulting in heightened tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. The two countries have been involved in a longstanding border dispute, AFP reported here.

The video was also shared alongside a similar claim on Facebook here and here; and on Twitter here and here in May and June 2020.

The claim is misleading; the video has circulated in Indian TV news reports since at least 2014.

A reverse image search on Yandex of keyframes extracted from the video in the misleading post using InVID-WeVerify, a digital verification tool, found a longer version of the video published here on YouTube, dated August 28, 2014.

The title of the almost 20-minute video reads: “Full Border Fight! Indian and Chinese Soldiers Faceoff in Arunachal Pradesh.”

Arunachal Pradesh, the northeasternmost state of India, shares borders with Bhutan in the west, Myanmar in the east and China in the north.

Both bordering the Chinese autonomous region of Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh is more than 3,000 km southeast of Ladakh, according to Google Maps.

Below are three sets of screenshot comparisons between the video in the misleading post (L) and the August 2014 YouTube video (R):

A keyword search on Google found the footage that purports to show a confrontation in Arunachal Pradesh was also published in Indian media reports in August 2014, such as here by India News and here by Zee News.

Similar videos were also published on August 27, 2014, on various Chinese video websites, including Sina Video here and another video platform here.

AFP too reported on the border situation between India and China in this August 2014 article, which states, in part: “Chinese troops have advanced in recent days into disputed territory claimed by India, echoing a similar incursion last year that raised tensions between the two rival giants.”

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

E-mail