Fact Check – Sudharshan News shared a school Independence Day play by giving it communal color

Amidst the massive celebration of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, a video of school student’s play gone viral on social media. The controversy was created after Sudarshan News has posted that video by giving communal colour and targeting Muslim Community. The video is of a play performed by students on the eve of Independence Day.  In the video, a boy is taking down the crown from the head of a girl who was portraying “Bharat Mata.” Further, the video was captioned,

Amidst the massive celebration of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, a video of school student’s play for communal harmony went viral on social media by giving communal colour. Sudarshan News has posted that controversial video by giving communal colour and targeting Muslim Community. The video is of a play performed by children on the eve of Independence Day.  In the video, a boy is taking down the crown from the head of a girl who was portraying “Bharat Mata.” Further, the video was captioned, “The hijab was worn by removing the crown ofBharat Mata.” (English Transalation)

Soon, this tweet has gone viral with more than 6.8K retweets and 9.7K likes. Similarly, many other users have shared this video with the similar claim.

Fact Check

To know the veracity of the viral claim, the DFRAC desk applied a reverse image search on different frames of the video. Consequently, we found a tweet from the account of POLICE COMMISSIONER LUCKNOW in which they posted a 2-minute 18-second long video. Tagging @Uppolice, they clarified that “Full video of drama presented by small children for communal harmony, which has been wrongly propagated by some anti-social elements and criminal act of spreading communal hatred has been done. Strict legal action will be taken against such people.”

Moreover, by watching the full video, one can see that one-by-one children were coming and praying according to the customs of various religions including Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian religions. And, the girl portraying Bharat Mata was performing prayer with all of them according to different customs.

At the same time, Arvind Chauhan of TOI shared a video of the teacher who had choreographed the act. In the video, she clarified that the only intention behind the video was unifying people of different religions and to promote communal harmony.

Conclusion

The school play on Independence Day was giving the message to promote communal harmony. But, unfortunately it gone viral on social media spreading hatred and communalism. After this fact check it is clear that Sudarshan news has shared the vial video with misleading claim.