Recently in Jalore, Rajasthan, a minor Dalit student Inder Kumar Meghwal was allegedly beaten up by a teacher. The child was suffering from an ear ailment and his ear vein had burst due to the alleged injury inflicted upon him by his teacher. He passed away after several days of treatment.
In the context of this news, a video is viral on social media. In this footage, a crowd of people can be seen with banners and the national flag in their hands. It is being claimed that the video is from the last rites of Inder Meghwal.
An account named Samta Today tweeted the video and wrote, “Inder Meghwal’s last journey.” (Archive link)
इंद्र मेघवाल की अंतिम यात्रा.. pic.twitter.com/jwGyXdIWps
— समता Today न्यूज़ (@samtatoday) August 16, 2022
A user named Shailesh Verma also tweeted the video with the same claim. (Archive link)
Twitter user ‘DK Mulnivasi’ also made the same claim while tweeting the video. (Archive link)
This video is widely circulating on Facebook and Twitter.
Fact-check
We did a reverse image search of a frame from the viral footage using Yandex. We found the thumbnail of this video with a higher resolution which was uploaded on Instagram by a user named Akash Nigam. However, after this thumbnail was indexed on the search engine, the user Akash Nigam changed their username so the link with this image is unavailable. We did not get any information from here, so we manually searched the accounts named Akash Nigam on Instagram. We found this video uploaded in better resolution on an account with a changed username as Aakash Nigam on August 11, 2021. This video predates Indra Meghwal’s funeral procession by a year.
We broke this high-resolution video into multiple frames with the help of a tool called InVid. Upon doing a reverse image search of one of the frames on Google, we found this video uploaded on a YouTube channel named ‘Akhileshiyans‘ on August 15, 2020. The title of this video reads, “Thousands gathered on the last farewell of martyr Jilajit Yadav of Jaunpur”.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9QlGIw22Fo]
Based on this information, we performed several keyword searches on YouTube. We found many such videos shot from different angles in which Jilajit Yadav’s body was being taken by ambulance. Readers will have a better grasp of the information by looking at the visual comparison given below.
According to an article published on News18 and Patrika, on August 12, 2020, Jilajit Yadav of Jaunpur lost his life in a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had promised a government job to one of the kin of the fallen soldier and a sum of 50 lakhs as assistance to the family. However, according to a report published on Zee News on August 11, 2022, the family has received the support amount from the government as promised, but no member of the family has been provided with a job yet.
To sum it up, the video of the last rites of soldier Jilajit Yadav, who lost his life in a terrorist attack in 2020, was shared by social media users as the funeral procession of Inder Kumar Meghwal, a minor Dalit student from Rajasthan.