Indian Bhojpuri music video falsely claimed to show killings in Nepal
A video circulating on Facebook claims that Hindutva followers are killing Muslims in Nepal. However, Dismislab’s investigation found that the video is not from any incident in Nepal, but rather from the shooting of a Bhojpuri music video in India.
A video was posted from a Facebook account on 3 August with the caption “Hindutva followers have taken to killing Nepali Muslims,” with the same text also overlaid on the video itself. In the 14-second video, several people are seen running in front of a structure with a minaret, holding saffron-coloured flags, with black smoke from fire billowing around them, and an ice cream van standing in front. As of the writing of this report, the video had been viewed more than 90,000 times and shared more than 530 times.
In its investigation, Dismislab conducted a reverse image search using keyframes from the video. This revealed an exact match with the first five seconds of a video published on 15 June from a Facebook profile named Pravin Kumar. The profile had posted multiple videos of the shoot (1, 2, 3). The Hindi caption of that 20-second video stated that the footage was from the shooting of a song by the musician Mani Miraj.
A subsequent search using related keywords led to an Instagram account belonging to an Indian content creator named Mani Miraj on social media. His real name is Md Meraj Alam. On 13 July, a Bhojpuri music video titled “Ram Ji Raham Kari,” was released on a YouTube channel called Web Music. The scenes from the 6-second to 13-second portion of that video also matched the scenes in the circulated video — the same minaret, the same people running with saffron flags, and the same ice cream van visible in the frame.
In other words, the video circulated on Facebook was actually taken from the shooting scene of a Bhojpuri music video in India, and it has no connection to Nepal or to the killing of Muslims.
(All social media captions, quotations, and news excerpts in this article have been translated into English from the languages in which they were originally posted or published.)
