Video from Bangladesh students’ protest viral with false communal claims

A video of two women in burqas riding a scooter and distributing water bottles to some men is viral on social media. In the video, the men could be seen carrying bamboo sticks. The video is being shared with a commentary where a man says in Hindi: “A riot is happening and look at the difference between ‘their’ women (referring to Muslim women) and these ‘woke’ women. They have stepped in the middle of the riots and are distributing water. ‘Drink water and continue your riot’. You cannot match this. You also need to understand what is going on here. They are wearing hijab and burqa as an indication that we are on your side, so you are not to rape us. So the ones who are not wearing the same will be raped.”

Premium subscribed X user Wokeflix (@wokeflix_) shared the video including the voice-over and in the end, one can also see the man who is commentating. The tweet has received over 52,000 views and has been retweeted more than 1,200 times. (Archive)

Where’s the lie ? pic.twitter.com/TMHkBFNV2Z

— Wokeflix (@wokeflix_) July 30, 2024

We noticed that the viral video carried a watermark of an Instagram username which said “@nitin_shukla_fan_club”. We found the same video on the Instagram page. The page’s bio carried a link to a YouTube channel that we found belonged to Nitin Shukla, who describes himself as “Analyst, Journalist, Author, Motivational Speaker, Mentor, Life Coach, Business Trainer.” On July 26, he did a YouTube Live, from where the viral video was taken. It occurs at the 2.06.56-minute mark onward in the YouTube Live.

Fact Check

We broke down the video into several key frames and ran a reverse image search on some of them. This led us to several posts on YouTube that carried the same video without the voice-over. A YouTube channel called MTA Family shared the video on their channel on July 21 with the title: “Water Distribution During the Anti-Government protest in Bangladesh”.

We found several other channels that posted the video saying that the visuals were from Bangladesh and the women were distributing water to student protesters. Below are a few instances.

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We also noticed a Bangladeshi flag in the background of the viral video. It can be seen in the following screengrab:

We reached out to a source in Dhaka who confirmed to us that the video was indeed from Bangladesh and that it was shot near the BRAC University in Dhaka. We compared the visuals seen in the video with Google Maps’ street view and it is clear that the video was shot on the road where the BRAC University was located and the buildings visible in the viral video could also be seen in the street view. Below is a comparison:

Bangladesh saw large-scale protests by students over job quota which provided for 30% reservation for descendants of the fighters of the 1971 Liberation War. The Bangladesh government had scrapped quotas in most of government jobs in 2018, but the reservations were reinstated by the Court on June 5 this year. Protesting against this, students took to the streets. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina refused to meet the protesters and called them ‘razakars’, an Arabic term for traitors used to refer to those who had assisted the Pakistani military in committing widespread atrocities against men and women in 1971. This enraged the students and they demanded an apology from the Prime Minister. The government then unleashed the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) to tackle the situation and more than 200 lives were lost in the ensuing clashes.

To sum up, the viral video is from the Bangladesh student protests. The video is being shared with misleading communal claims by Indian social media users.