Mamta banerjee was in news recently after her mixing up Astronaut Rakesh Sharma to the bollywood actor and director Rakesh Roshan amid the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3.
Once again a video is going viral, where Mamata Banerjee can be seen to claim that the Hindu epic Mahabharat was written by Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam.
A twitter user named Political Kida (@PoliticalKida) was found to share the video with the caption,”After sending Rakesh Roushan and Indira Gandhi to the Moon.The New Gem of Mamata Banerjee.”
Furthermore, Shehzad Jai Hind(@Shehzad_Ind), BJP National Spokesperson, also shared the claim.
Additionally, media houses like TimesNow, Republicworld, FreePressJournal, Panchjanya and others also shared the similar claims in their reports.
Fact Check
On investigation, DFRAC found that the video was cropped to mislead. The full video was uploaded on AITC Official YouTube channel on August 28, 2023. The caption of the video when translated read ,”Trinamool Chhatra Parishad student rally of 2023, at the foot of the Gandhi statue”
From the 2:51:47 time mark in the video, Mamata Banerjee, speaking in Bengali, encourages her audience to study the various literary works. Specifically, she mentions the works of Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Birsa Munda, Raghunath Murmu, Matua Thakur, and Panchanan Burma of the Rajbangshi community. Additionally, she references the epic Mahabharata.
She paused for a brief time after talking about Mahabharata. Following the pause, she quotes a Bengali poem by Nazrul Islam, “Nazrul Islam wrote, ‘Quran, Puran, Ved, Vedanta, Bible, Tripitaka, Granth Saheb, Zend-Avesta … read as much as you want.”
Conclusion
Based on the fact check, it is clear that the video is cropped out-of-context. In the complete footage, she can be heard encouraging the audience to read works from various domains, including the epics. She did not specifically mention that Mahabharat was written by Kazi Nazrul Islam.
