A Bhartiya Janta Party worker from Gujarat, Dinesh Desai, shared a collage of two images; the first image is of a victim of the recent communal clash from Rajasthan’s Karauli, and the second image is of a skullcapped man seen pelting stone.
The first image shows an emotionally broken old Muslim man standing by a dilapidated shop, and the second image shows an old man involved in the riot. Both the images are used together with the intent to show that both men are the same, while he is crying in the one image and is involved in the riot in the other image.
However, we found that the second image is on the internet from 2016 and is not from the recent communal clash of Rajasthan’s Karauli.
Desai shared the collage with the caption: सच्चाई (Truth) and the text on the first image reads “on-camera’ and on the second image “off-camera”.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
At the time of writing this fact-checking article, the post by the BJP worker received high engagement with over 4.6K retweets, 16.6k like and 132 quote tweets.
FactO Check:
Image: 1
Meer Faisal, a journalist on Tuesday, 12 April, posted a video clip on Twitter of the man in the first image. Faisal reports that the old man is Najmuddin from Karauli, Rajasthan. He owned a small shop selling dry fruits and spices which were looted and burned in the riot.
Najmuddin had a small shop selling dry fruits & spices at Boora Batasha Gali , Karauli, Rajasthan. It was the evening of April 2, 2022 when a Hindutva mob attacked his shop , looted some of the items and burnt the entire remaining. Najmuddin has 3 daughters and a boy, + pic.twitter.com/Ts5NDVCj3n
— Meer Faisal (@meerfaisal01) April 12, 2022
Freelance journalist, Samriddhi Sakunia, also reported in an article published on 14 April that the dry fruits and spices shop of 70-year-old Najmuddin was fully burnt which stood in Boora Batasha Gali of Rajasthan’s Karauli.
Image: 2
On conducting the reverse image search of the second image, we found that the image has been on the Internet since 2016 and have used several times with different misleading claims.
We found the image posted by a Twitter user in January 2016, the user claims that the image is of the Malda riots. We then searched for the news reports of the Malda riot and corroborated that a riot had broken out in Kaliachak, Malda district of West Bengal in January 2016; however, we couldn’t independently verify the origin of the image.
During Malda Riots..Very Peaceful Protestor Tries to Pacify Situation by Throwing a Stone @tathagata2 @bengaleebabu pic.twitter.com/mXtQrESTvM
— সমরজিৎ দাস। ꜱᴀᴍᴀʀᴊɪᴛ 🇮🇳 (@jitsamar14) January 8, 2016
Conclusion:
With the above finding, it can be concluded that both the images are not related. Desai posted the image intending to mislead people.
