Fact Check: Misleading Pictures of Mahapanchayat at Muzaffarnagar went viral

Lakhs of farmers gushed out into Muzaffarnagar on Sunday for the Samyukt Kisan Morcha’s largest mahapanchayat so far to hear Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait declare his resolution to expel the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh next year by tapping into rural anger and uniting farmers and workers across caste and religion.

Thousands of people have also shown interests via social media platforms like twitter, supporting the movement and tweeting about the same.

In the midst of this, a picture has been spread out by a verified account on twitter known as Tribal Army, showing crowd supporting a movement with Indian flag. The account handler also wrote “India stand with Farmers” along with some viral hashtags on Muzaffarnagar protest.

 

Even a MP of Birmingham Edgbaston and Shadow International Development, Preet Kaur Gill posted this picture along with some other pictures on the Muzaffarnagar protest.

Fact Check:

After some pictures got viral, we did some reverse image searches to check out whether these images are legit or not, which are being shared across social media platform. With our results, we found out that these pictures are of kisan panchayat at Shamli, Uttar Pradesh dated on Feb 5, 2021 and of Jind district in Haryana.

These pictures have been shared by HW News, Tribune and also by The New Indian Express on 3^rd, 6^th and 24^th Feb respectively.

This clearly depicts that the pictures used in the post are misleading and are not from the current Muzaffarnagar protest but from Shamli, Uttar Pradesh and Jind, Haryana. Users are spreading these images to show the intensity of the protest and to amplify its influence on the government and people.

DFRAC Editor

Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) is a non-partisan and independent media organisation which focuses on fact-checking and identifying hate speech. With the popularisation of the internet came the challenge of information overload and often times, our feeds are overpopulated with conflicting, incendiary and false information which is increasingly becoming difficult to ignore and not believe in

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