Hunger striker taken to hospital in India, video circulated as rape of imam's daughter
A video showing police carrying a person away on a stretcher has recently spread on the social media platform Facebook. Using this footage, one person claimed that the daughter of an imam at a mosque in India was raped. However, Dismislab’s fact-check found that the video is actually from when student leader Danish Ali, who was on hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in Delhi, was taken to the hospital in a critical condition.
A 24-second video was posted on July 6 from a Facebook page named Al Madina Store. First 7 seconds of the video shows a sick person being carried on a stretcher through a crowd of police and ordinary people.
While showing the video on screen, one person can be heard saying, “No arguments, brother, just share this video at lightning speed. Watch this if you are a Muslim – in India, 30 people together raped an imam’s daughter at a mosque, and that too over the course of a week. What country do you live in? I want to say one thing to the Indian constitution and the Indian police administration — if justice is not delivered for this imam’s daughter, the whole of India will burn. Share this video as widely as possible, my Muslim brothers.”
The post has so far been shared 14,000 times. The video has been viewed more than 650,000 times. In the comments, one person wrote, “Let them be brought to justice.” Another wrote, “If there’s no justice, they’ll snatch the priest’s daughter and do the same thing, tit for tat”.
The same video, with the same claim, was also spread from multiple Facebook accounts (1, 2). In addition, the video was circulated by a Facebook page calling itself a news outlet, Radar BD News 24. The caption read, “30 people together rape mosque imam’s daughter in India”. This video has been shared 1,500 times, and viewed more than 25,000 times.
A reverse image search using key frames from the video brings up reports published in multiple media outlets (1, 2). In these video reports, the clothing of the person lying on the stretcher, the pillowcase beneath his head, the person pulling the stretcher and his clothing all completely match the scenes in the widely circulated video. The news reports reveal that the video was recorded on April 4, when student leader Danish Ali, who was on hunger strike, was taken to the hospital in a critical condition.
A video of this incident was found on the verified Facebook and Instagram accounts of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation. It states that Danish Ali, joint secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, was admitted to the hospital in a serious condition during a hunger strike demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan. The “Cockroach Janata Party” (a satirical name adopted by the protesting group) began this movement on June 20, demanding the education minister’s resignation over allegations of irregularities in NEET (National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test) and other competitive examinations.
In other words, the video that was spread with the claim that an imam’s daughter was raped in India is, in fact, footage of a student leader on hunger strike demanding the education minister’s resignation.
