Man shaking Jinnah's hand is not Ziaur Rahman
A video has spread on the social media platform Facebook with the claim that former Bangladeshi president Ziaur Rahman stood in line to meet Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s first governor general. However, Dismislab’s fact-check found that the video is from 1947, and the person shaking hands with Jinnah is not Ziaur Rahman.
On September 16, a 20-second video was posted from a Facebook account. Text overlaid on the video reads, “The great Muslim leader who founded a ‘Muslim nation’ by separating from India” (verbatim). The post’s caption read, “Ziaur Rahman stood in line to meet Muhammad Ali Jinnah.”
In the first few seconds of the video, Jinnah can be seen shaking hands with a number of people standing in a line. At the 4 second mark of the video, one person is marked with a red circle, indicating that he is Ziaur Rahman. As of the writing of this report, the post had received 30,900 reactions, been shared more than 5,000 times, and been viewed more than 900,000 times.
This handshake video was found to have spread with the same claim from several Facebook pages (1, 2, 3) and profiles (1, 2, 3).
To verify the claim, a reverse image search using keyframes of the video found a video uploaded in 2014 to the British Pathé YouTube channel. British Pathé is one of the world’s most important historical newsreel archives, holding more than 85,000 historical films spanning the years 1896 to 1978.
The British Pathé video is titled “Swearing In Ceremony Of Pakistan Governor General (1947).” Certain scenes in that 4-minute-17-second video match exactly with scenes in the viral video.
At the 50th second of the video, a person (the one claimed to be Ziaur Rahman) can be seen shaking hands with Jinnah. The same person also appears in a close-up shot from 1 minute 16 seconds to 1 minute 18 seconds, where Jogendra Nath Mandal, Pakistan’s first law and labour minister, and Fazlur Rahman, its education minister, stood in the front row.
A reverse image search on a keyframe from that close-up shot found a colorized version uploaded to the photo-sharing site Flickr on January 15, 2017, captioned “Fazlur Rahman and Mandal.” No resemblance was found between the person claimed to be Ziaur Rahman in the photo and the actual appearance of former Bangladeshi president Ziaur Rahman. However, Dismislab could not confirm the identity of the person in the video.
A mismatch in age as well
Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s swearing-in ceremony as Pakistan’s governor-general took place in Karachi, then Pakistan’s capital, on August 15, 1947. Ziaur Rahman was born on January 19, 1936. This means he was about 11 years and seven months old at the time of the ceremony. Yet the person seen standing in line and shaking hands with Jinnah in the video appears to be a full-grown, middle-aged man.
In other words, there is no possibility that the person seen in the video is Ziaur Rahman.
