Photographs of an old man with a younger woman are circulating on social media with communal claims that the man in the image, a Muslim named Mohammad Shakeel, married his daughter-in-law less than a week after his son passed away. Calling it an ‘unbelievable secular reality,’ social media users claimed that the incident is from Deoria, Uttar Pradesh.
On July 12, X user @SouleFacts shared the images—one showing the two wearing garlands and another of them posing—and wrote that instead of mourning his son, who died five days ago, Shakeel chose to marry his daughter-in-law.
X users @SanataniMuslim_, @Vini__007, @Uday_Yadavji, @Warlock_Shubh and others shared the images with similar claims. The images and claims were also viral on Facebook.
It is worth noting that the same pictures were viral between 2019 and 2021 as well. At the time, the photographs were shared by several Bangladesh-based news outlets, such as Dhaka Post, Bangla TV, amadershomoy.com, news24bd.tv and dailynewstimesbd.com. These outlets had reported that Noor Islam (45) of Cheprajhar village in the Atwari Upazila of Panchagarh district, Bangladesh, married his 22-year-old daughter-in-law, Belal Hossai.
Fact Check
Alt News did a reverse image search of the viral images, which led us to a news report in Dainik Bhaskar’s Divya Marathi from November 8, 2017. According to the report, the man in the picture is Rajesh Kumar Himatsingka, a 70-year-old businessman from Assam, who was the managing director of Himatsingka Auto Enterprises Ltd. since 1987.
The report featured the same images that were doing the rounds on social media recently. The report said that Himatsingka was lonely after the death of his wife and remarried. The woman was much younger than him.
The Malayalam edition of The Times of India and Swadesh News also published a report on the same incident in 2017, along with the viral images. These articles also mention that Himatsingka faced much criticism online for marrying the woman, who was 45 years younger than him.
In May 2018, News18 Assam (North East) reported that Himatsingka was hospitalised after he tried to kill himself owing to a property-related dispute.
Thus, we were certain that the images were not of a Muslim man named Mohammad Shakeel from Uttar Pradesh but of someone named Rajesh Kumar Himatsingka.
However, a keyword search with Shakeel’s name and the viral claim led us to a case from the Bansangli village in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, from June 2025. According to reports by NDTV India and Times of India, a 55-year-old man named Shakeel allegedly eloped with his son’s fiancée and married her.
To sum up, the man and woman seen in the viral images are Rajesh Kumar Himatsingka and his younger wife from Assam, not Mohammad Shakeel. The images have been online since 2017 and werencirculated before with different claims. A man named Md Shakeel from Uttar Pradesh did marry his son’s fiancee, according to some media reports, but they are not the ones seen in the viral photos. Also, claims that Shakeel married his daughter-in-law five days after his son passed away are baseless.
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