Congress supporter uses a video from Telangana to claim BJP is defaming Islam
A video from 2020 taken in Kurnool during a bust of alcohol smuggling is used to spread disinformation.
Claim
How low will you stoop to defame a religion,,a group of people who will do anything for money were caught pelting stones at the police wearing a burqa in #कर्नाटक #KarnatakaAssemblyElection2023
Rating
Explanation
People of Karnataka has voted on their Legislative Assembly Elections on May 10, 2023 and are awaiting results as the votes are scheduled to be counted on May 13, 2023. In the runup to the election, many communal states were made to drum up the Hindu-Muslim divide, especially by the BJP and its right-wing ecosystem. BJP Karnataka’s state president Nalin Kumar Kateel asked people to forget about “small issues” like roads and drains and focus on Love Jihad, a conspiracy theory which claims that muslims are making an organised effort to seduce Hindu women and convert them to Islam through love and marriage.
BJP member and the Chief Minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, claimed that Congress leaders Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar are family members of Tipu Sultan and they should go to Pakistan if they want to celebrate Tipu Sultan Jayanthi. The State President of BJP also claimed that this election between the ideologies of Tipu Sultan and V.D.Savarkar. The state also saw controversies surrounding the hijab bans and the turmoil that it caused, from which the state hasn’t fully recovered.
On the election day, a Congress supporter posted a video on Twitter in which he supposedly claimed that the supporters of the BJP are defaming the muslims and Islam by pelting stones at the police while they are disguised as muslim women in a burqa. The tweet received more than 6000 retweets and had close to 2 lakh views.
What’s the truth?
In our search, we found that the video is actually from August 2020. The video is from Kurnool, a border town in Andhra Pradesh which shares its borders with Telangana. Some disguised as muslim women using a burqa were smuggling illicit alcohol from Telangana during which the Police intercepted them and arrested them. A longer version of the video being shared in social media can be seen below in a news report from ETV Andhra Pradesh.
The same video has been used several times in 2020, 2021 and 2022 to create misinformation which YouTurn had covered which can be seen here and here.
Read More: Did Muslim women from Karnataka drop a toddler while fighting?
Conclusion
A 2020 video from Telangana is used to falsely claim that the members of BJP and RSS are trying to defame Islam and muslims during the Karnataka elections for electoral gains.
