A video showing two women wearing hijab being caught by a mob and being beaten up has gone viral across social media. The video is going viral in the context of the recent split verdict in the hijab controversy.
On 13 October, the Supreme Court failed to decide whether Muslim students can wear the hijab in schools and colleges. Reportedly, two judges expressed opposing views where one judge upheld a Karnataka high court order stating that the hijab was not "essential" to Islam while the other said that wearing the hijab was a matter of choice.
Claim:
The video shows a group of women gathered around two women dressed in hijab. These two women are forced to remove their clothes as several people call out. A social media user tweeted the video with a caption, "Burqa / Hijab clad women caught red handed in Telangana Freedom of choice is Freedom to cheat / Rob."
Abhijit Majumder, editor-in-chief of Earshot.in, tweeted the video claiming that people wearing hijab are free to "shoplift" and conduct to carry out "terror attacks."
Ambuj Bharadwaj, a reporter at Panchajanya, circulated the same video saying, "Women wearing Burqa/Hijab caught red-handed shoplifting in Telangana."
Panchajanya, a right-wing news outlet, also tweeted the video with a similar claim.
Fact Check:
The Logical Indian fact check team verified the viral claim and found it to be misleading. The vira video is more than 5 years old.
We used InVid's Keyframe analysis tool to isolate the keyframes of the video. We then conducted a reverse image search on the isolated keyframes and came across a video uploaded on Facebook on July 10, 2017.
The caption of the post reads, "Lady Thief caught red-handed in shopping mart at Nirmal, Telangana. Yesterday, non-Muslim girls were caught at D-mart while wearing a burqa."
We also came across a video uploaded by Kota Teja Naidu on July 8, 2017. The video is titled "Lady Muslim thieves looting from shops by hiding things under Burka."
The description of the video reads, "It happened in some where in Telugu speaking state, mostly Telangana .where two ladies were caught red-handedly stealing things in supermarkets and playing the victim card at the end."
Conclusion:
We did not found much detail about the viral video, however, we found that the video shared by several netizens actually dates back to 2017. The video has been circulating for 5 years and is not recent. Thus, we can conclude that the viral video is shared with a misleading claim.
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