Two-year-old procession video shared as recent threat to stop Hindu worship
A video has been circulating on Facebook with the claim that Islamic jihadists in Bangladesh took to the streets and threatened to prevent Hindus from celebrating puja. However, a Dismislab fact-check found that the video is two years old. It shows a procession organized on September 24, 2024, to demand that a puja organized by members of the Hindu community be moved elsewhere instead of being held in Sector 13 of Uttara.
On September 26, a 21-second video was posted from a Facebook profile named “Bappa Sarkar.” The post said, “Bangladesh’s Islamic jihadists have now taken to the streets openly and threatened to prevent Hindus from holding puja.” In the video, participants in the procession can be heard chanting, “We will not allow puja at the Sector 13 field,” “We will not allow puja at the Eidgah field (Eid prayer ground),” and “We do not accept it, nor will we accept it.” Until the publication of this report, the video had been viewed 60,000 times and shared more than 400 times.
The video was also found posted from multiple Facebook profiles and pages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
A relevant keyword search found a video published on September 24, 2024, on the Facebook page of “uttaranews24.com.” The video, titled “Residents’ procession and rally demanding no ‘puja’ at Uttara Sector 13 Eidgah field,” shows multiple people who also appear in the video circulating on Facebook. The surrounding scenes in the two videos also match.
The video description said that residents had demanded that the puja be held at a government-designated site in Sector 17 instead of Sector 13.
Multiple news outlets also published reports (1, 2, 3) about the incident. A report published in the online edition of Voice of America on September 27, 2024, said that a dispute had arisen between local members of the Hindu and Muslim communities in Uttara, Dhaka, over Durga Puja. Following demands from local residents, the issue was resolved on September 24 through a joint meeting involving the army, police, political leaders and the puja committee, and it was decided that Durga Puja would be held at Mugdha Chattar in Sector 7.
In other words, an old video of a residents’ procession in 2024 demanding that a puja at the Sector 13 Eidgah field be moved elsewhere is being circulated as a recent incident of preventing Hindus from celebrating puja.
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.
