Fact-Check: Comedian Vir Das’ bio changed to “gang rapist” and “Abdullah”

Comedian Vir Das has been receiving a lot of criticism and also praise for his comedy special titled “I come from two Indias” performed in the US. Many Indians took offence to his words and he was trolled relentlessly on Twitter for it. Amidst this, people claimed that his name was “Vir Abdullah Das” claiming that he was Muslim.  

Users cited his Wikipedia page for the same claim.  

उसका नाम सिर्फ वीर दास नहीं उसका पूरा नाम वीर अब्दुल्लाह दास है….
वह अपना मजहबी कार्य जेहाद कर रहा है….
बस तरीका बदल गया है…. pic.twitter.com/hlWYi7Ns7H

— रीटा सिंघल 🇮🇳🚩🔱 (@RitaSinghal6) November 18, 2021

Fact-Check:

Firstly, we checked Das’ wikipedia page and found that his page does not currently say that his middle name is Abdullah. In order to see the changes made to his page, we went through the various versions of his page archived on Wikipedia. We found that numerous revisions were made to his page between 16th and 18th November. A version on 17th November said that his middle name was Abdullah. It also said that Vir Das is a Nigerian citizen which is also untrue.

We also found a previous version where his bio was changed to “gang rapist”.

However, there are no reports online that support these claims and were only made by disgruntled users. 

These claims are 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

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