This video shows a Hindu festival, not people smashing idols because of Covid-19
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on May 17, 2021 at 18:28
- 3 min read
- By James OKONG'O, AFP South Africa
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The video was shared here on Facebook on May 11, 2021, in what appears to be a news bulletin.
The narrator in the clip claims that a “large number of Indians” are throwing away statues of deities they worship because they could not protect them from the deadly surge of Covid-19.
“Indians throw idols on the street because they could not save them from Coronavirus,” the caption of the Facebook post reads.
The video was also shared here and here on Facebook.
Video reposted as an online newscast
AFP Fact Check previously debunked the same video here in May 2020, but the clip has recently resurfaced online.
The logo for news website Shia Waves is visible in the left-hand corner of the video but AFP Fact Check found no record of the same video on its website. However, the site has a text story phrased in the same way as the segment readout in the Facebook video.
The footage has resurfaced while India is undergoing a deadly surge in Covid-19 infections.
As of May 17, 2021, India had recorded more than 24.5 million cases of Covid-19 and nearly 275,000 deaths.
Video predates pandemic
By using the Invid-WeVerify tool to run reverse image searches on the video’s keyframes, AFP Fact Check traced the footage to social media posts from 2015.
The clip can be found here and here on Facebook in posts published on September 24 and 29, 2015, respectively.
One of the post captions mentions “Ganesha”.
Ganesha or Ganesh is the Indian “god of beginnings” who is traditionally worshipped before embarking on any major endeavor.
A 10-day ritual known as Ganesh Chaturthi is hosted annually in August or September in India in honor of Ganesh. In September 2020, AFP posted a video here showing Hindus celebrating the 2020 Ganesh Chaturthi festival.
The timing of the two above Facebook posts suggests that they were released during or just after the 2015 Ganesh Chaturthi ritual.
The caption on the September 24, 2015 post written in Hindi identified the location of the river where the idols were being thrown as National Highway 44 in Telangana.
In May 2020, when the video first surfaced, AFP Fact Check found the bridge on Google Maps in Tungabhadra in Telangana, India.
Below is a side-by-side comparison of the picture on Google Maps (L) and an image from the original video (R).
Comparing the bridge seen in the Facebook video to the one on Google maps, we identified two visual clues: the black and white painted barrier and the reddish metal barrier.
When AFP Fact Check analysed the same video in May 2020, we found the bridge runs over the Krishna river.
Comparing the bridge in the video to the one on Google Maps, AFP Fact Check then noticed two visual clues that can also be seen in the current version of the video; the red barrier and the cylindrical white structure.
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