Fact-Check: Did the Indian Army have a Muslim regiment?

On September 19,2021, users on Facebook started posting an image with a lot of text in it. The text in Hindi claimed that the Indian army had a Muslim regiment which was disbanded after the soldiers refused to fight in the war against Pakistan in 1965.

Several users made this claim on Facebook.

Fact-Check:

Upon researching the claim, we checked the Indian army website for any Muslim regiments but found none. We also found a Times of India article written by retired Lieutenant General of the Indian army, Syed Ata Hasnain who talked at length about this claim and disbanded it completely. According to his article, Muslims have always been a part of the Indian army and several soldiers of the religion have performed countless acts of bravery for the country.  He blames this kind of misinformation on Pakistani sources who want to create disharmony in India.

Since there is no record of this regiment ever existing, therefore this claim is fake.

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

See author's posts