Viral video of rally seeking Chittagong Hill Tracts’ inclusion in India is from Tripura, not Bangladesh

A 1.06-minute video featuring a man sloganeering at a demonstration demanding the inclusion of the Chittagong Hill Tracts with India is being widely circulated on social media. The clip is being shared with claims that locals want Chittagong, Bangladesh, to be annexed to India. 

In the video clip, the man could be heard saying, “We are raising our voice from here to Dr. Muhammad Yunus that until the Chittagong Hill Tracts becomes a part of India, the armed forces must be withdrawn from the hilly region. Until the Chittagong Hill Tracts becomes an indivisible part of India, or is incorporated into India, the military rule and mass killing there must stop, or else this movement of ours will continue. I urge my brothers and sisters of our tribe who are in Bangladesh that if you stay united and work together, we will be there for you, backing you up.”

X account Hindu Voice (@HinduVoice_in) shared this video on September 29, 2025, claiming that the residents of Chittagong Hill Tracts were demanding to be a part of India. (Archive)

Rally in Chittagong Hill Tracts region of #Bangladesh.

Janajatiya people are demanding to be a part of India. @narendramodi are you listening? pic.twitter.com/lLzlvtXv2I

— Hindu Voice (@HinduVoice_in) September 29, 2025

The post has garnered 164,000 views.

Another X account, Times Algebra (@TimesAlgebraIND), which claims to be a news update portal on X, shared the purported video on September 29, 2025, claiming that protests had erupted in Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh and locals were seeking inclusion with Indian territory. 

X user Jitendra Pratap Singh (@jpsin1), who shares disinformation and pro-BJP propaganda on a regular basis, shared this video on September 26, 2024. (Archive)

Several social media users have shared the video clip with similar claims. A few of them can be seen in the gallery below:

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Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of the claim, we performed a reverse image search on a few key frames from the viral video, which led us to a Facebook page called “Voice of CHT“. The full video — 2.09-minute long — was posted on this page on September 23, 2024.

According to the Facebook post, the protest rally was organised on September 23, 2024, in Pecharthal, Tripura. The caption that accompanied the video can be roughly translated as, “A demand to annex the Chittagong Hill Tracts with India was raised at a rally, along with a warning that the people of Tripura will not assist unless the four parties of the hills unite.”

On a closer examination of the video, we spotted banners held by the protestors. One of them was a red banner, written in English, that stated that the protest took place in Pecharthal, a town in Tripura, India. Another banner, black and blue in colour, mentions Unakoti, Tripura. Pecharthal is a town located within the Unakoti district in north Tripura.

Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is a mountainous region with forests in southeastern Bangladesh, bordering India and Myanmar. It comprises three districts: Khagragacchi, Rangamati, and Bandarban. The Indian state of Tripura shares a border with the CHT region. 

The indigenous people of Chittagong Hill Tracts and Tripura share deep ethnic, cultural, and linguistic connections. Historically, before the British demarcation and later the India-Bangladesh border, these indigenous groups inhabited the same contiguous area, allowing shared traditions. Several indigenous ethnic groups and tribes are found in both Tripura and Chittagong Hill Tracts, including Tripuri (Hindu), Chakma (Buddhist), Marma or Mog (Buddhist), and Tanchangya (Buddhist).

The banners displayed during the rally, visible in the video, indicated that the protest was organised to condemn violence against the religious minorities in CHT, Bangladesh.

We found multiple news reports (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on several rallies and demonstrations organised by various indigenous groups in Tripura, following the fall of Sheik Hasina’s government, to protest against the alleged atrocities and killings of the indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh by the military.

We spoke to a senior journalist based in Agartala who confirmed that the rally had been taken out in Pecharthal in solidarity with ethnic groups in Bangladesh.

To sum up, the claims that citizens of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh want to be included in the Indian territory are false. The viral video does not depict a protest in Bangladesh; rather, it shows a rally held in the Indian state of Tripura, organised over a year ago.