Lighthouse Journalism found a video being shared on social media platforms. It was claimed in the caption that former Sirsa MP and BJP candidate Ashok Tanwar was attacked recently in Sirsa, Haryana. During the investigation we found the viral claims to be misleading.
Claim:
X user Manish Kumar advocate shared the viral video on his profile.
Check the archive version of the post here.
Other users too are sharing the video with the same claim.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by uploading the video in the InVid tool and obtaining several keyframes from the video.
However, the reverse image search did not yield any proper results.
We hence turned to Google keyword search. We searched for the term, “Sirsa car attacked”.
Through this we found reports from 2021, which mentioned that Haryana’s deputy speaker, Ranbir Singh Gangwa’s car was attacked. 100 protesters were booked by Sirsa police in the incident.
We also found a video report of the incident.
The report mentioned: The farmers threw stones at the deputy speaker’s vehicle and attacked him, after which the police are identifying the people and taking further action.
We found the ‘watermark’ on the keyframe obtained as, ‘PB News’, when searched on YouTube, we found out that the name was Pahredar Bharat News.
We then ran a Facebook keyword search, “Pahredar Bharat News रणबीर गंगवा”.
And found a video uploaded on 23 June 2022. The caption in Hindi said: डिप्टी स्पीकर रणबीर गंगवा की गाड़ी पर हुए पथराव मामले में किसानों की हुई मुलाकात अब बहुत जल्द होंगे मामले रद्द।
Translation: Farmers interrogated in the stone pelting incident on Haryana deputy speaker Ranbir Gangwa’s car.
This was the same video that was being circulated as recent.
Conclusion: Old video of attack on Haryana’s deputy speaker Ranbir Gangwa’s car resurfaces as recent from Sirsa as that of attack on BJP candidate Ashok Tanwar’s car. Viral claims are false.
