CLAIMSenior
congress leader
Shashi Tharoor retweeted a video that shows a
poor woman lying on a roadside while two kids try to wake her up. The kids sprinkle water on the woman's head who appears to have fainted.
The tweet Tharoor retweeted was made by Congress leader Archana Dalmia. Tagging BJP’s official Twitter handle, Dalmia posted the video along with a text in Hindi.
A loose translation of what she wrote in Hindi reads, “What makes life so cheap. I appeal to every mother in the world to see this. It does not belong to any film.
Migrants are wandering on the streets. Can BJP not wake up?”
Dalmia used several hashtags like #MigrantCrisis, #SpeakUpIndia, #SPEAKFORTHEDEAD implying that the woman in the video was a migrant worker who died during the
coronavirus lockdown in the country.
Here’s the screengrab of the tweet that now stands deleted
TRUTHThe video is at least two years old. It is not related to any migrant death during lockdown.
VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGYOn closely observing the video, we found that the lips and head of the woman move a lot throughout. She appears to have either fainted or blacked out due to hunger or weakness.
Then using InVid Google Chrome extension, we broke the video into keyframes and ran reverse image search on them via Google and Yandex search engines.
This led us to a video posted on July 13, 2018 by a Facebook page Major Singh Sandhu.
We could not independently trace the location of the video or the time it first surfaced on the Internet. But we could establish that the video was at least two years old and thus had nothing to do with coronavirus lockdown.
VERDICTTimes Fact Check has found that a 2018 video is being shared by Congress leader to target BJP with a false claim of a migrant dying on a street.