This video has circulated online in reports about pro-Punjabi language demonstrations since 2019
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on January 14, 2021 at 10:15
- 2 min read
- By AFP India
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The video was shared here in a Facebook post on January 9, 2021.
It shows a man in a yellow turban painting over a Hindi-language sign in black as bystanders look on.
The post’s caption in Hindi translates to English as: “After vandalising Reliance Jio [telecommunication] towers, their next job is to not to allow the Hindi language. Who says they are farmers?”
The misleading post was shared as mainly Sikh farmers from the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana participated in protests against new agriculture laws introduced by the Modi administration. The demonstrations began on November 26, 2020, AFP reported here.
The caption also refers to the vandalisation of telecommunication towers allegedly by protesting farmers in the two states, as reported here by the Hindustan Times.
The video was also shared alongside the same claim on Facebook here, here, here, here and on Twitter here, here and here.
The claim, however, is false.
A reverse image search on Yandex by keyframes of the video, obtained using the digital verification tool InVID-WeVerify, found a 22-second clip from the same video published here on YouTube on February 22, 2019.
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