Unrelated video shared as Hathras victim being felicitated for academic success

A video of a young woman walking amongst a group of people bowing to her, touching her feet and offering flowers is doing the rounds on social media. It is being claimed that the video depicts the 19-year-old Dalit woman who was allegedly tortured and gang-raped by four upper-caste men last month. Priyanka Gautam, who claims to be a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) worker, posted the video with the message, “हाथरस_की_बेटी_[name redacted] पढ़ाई मे टॉपर भी थी. ओर जो स्वागत हुआ देखने लायक था. (Hathras’s daughter was also a topper in studies. Her welcome is worth watching.)” The post has garnered more than 15,000 shares so far.

The Hathras victim had succumbed to her injuries on September 29 in Delhi’s Safdarjung hospital and reportedly cremated by Uttar Pradesh police in the wee hours of September 30 without her parents’ consent. The incident has sparked massive outrage in the country.

Another post by Facebook user Kiran Yadav has amassed over 1,600 shares. Several other individuals on Facebook and Twitter shared the video with the same message.

Fact-check

Alt News broke the video into multiple keyframes and reverse searched them on different search engines such as Bing, Yandex and Google. One of the searches on Yandex revealed that the same video was uploaded by a YouTube user MD Adil Fayaz on February 19, 2020.

We found that MD Adil Fayaz was felicitated by an online marketing company called “Safe Shop”. Alt News got in touch with Adil Fayaz who informed that the woman is a senior associate with Safe Shop. Boomlive also spoke with officials at Safe Shop, Hyderabad and confirmed the same. The video is from 2019 or early 2020, the officials informed.

It is noteworthy that in a statement given to The Indian Express, the Hathras victim’s mother said that she was pulled out of school in class 5.

Therefore, an old and unrelated video was shared as the Hathras victim being felicitated by a crowd for her academic success.