As the Supreme Court clarified recently that the matter pertaining to Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) data cross-checking against the voter-verifiable audit trail (VVPAT) records will be heard soon, Lighthouse Journalism found a video being widely shared on the social media platforms. It was claimed along with the video that the crowd seen in the video has gathered in Punjab to protest against the EVM machines. During the investigation we found the claim to be false. The video was found to be from Shant Mahayagya that happened at Gawas.
Claim:
X user Tanvir Rangrez 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 chrome extension and obtained several screenshots from the video.
We found the visuals from the viral video in a reel shared on an Instagram handle, ‘rudra_khosh‘.
The text on the video suggested that the video shows ‘Gawas Shant Mahayagya’.
We also found the visuals on a video shared on YouTube shorts.
The location in both the reels was tagged as, ‘Gawas’.
We then ran a Google keyword search and found out several news reports about the event.
The news reports mentioned that the Shant Mahayagya was performed in the Gawas village in Himachal Pradesh after 38 years.
We also found several videos of the Mahayagya on various channels on YouTube.
Conclusion: Video from Shant Mahayagya performed in Gawas, Himachal Pradesh shared as protests against the use of EVM in Punjab. Viral claim is false.
