CLAIMMigrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are fleeing
Gujarat
after
reports of attacks on migrant workers in at least six districts in the state. Migrants were attacked after the news of a labourer from Bihar being arrested for raping a 14-month-old girl spread.
As Congress Party, and the
Bharatiya Janata Party that is in power in Gujarat, are engaged in blame game for the attacks on migrants, fake-news purveyors are ensuring that a video -- that shows hundreds of people struggling to get into a train -- is perceived as that of migrants desperately trying to flee Gujarat.
The said video is being shared widely on social media platforms, mostly with a caption that closely translates to - "Due to repeated attacks on migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in Gujarat, 8,000 migrants fleeing the state is a matter of concern."
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE: Here are some other tweets with the same video and caption:
The same video is being shared widely on Facebook as well, but with a caption that closely translates to - “In the Gujarat incident, landlords have asked tenants to vacate. See the video, see how tensed these people are.” This caption written in Hindi doesn't out-rightly say migrants are fleeing from Gujrat but implies it.
These videos, posted on October 7 and October 8, have gotten over 25,000 shares and have been viewed more than 3,00,000 times in total.
TRUTHThe video showing a massive crowd trying to enter a train that is being shared with the claim that migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are fleeing Gujarat is actually from Kolkata's
Ranaghat Junction railway station
.
VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGYFor starters, when a video is shared by different social media users with identical captions, we get a hunch that there's something wrong.
The claim is that Gujarat migrants are trying to flee the state in desperation and fear of being attacked by locals. The train seen in the video, however, is an EMU (Electric-Multiple Unit) train / local train that would not take these 'scared' people to Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. But since it could be claimed that migrants were trying to reach however far they can at that moment, we decided to investigate the video further.
Times Fact Check used InVid video verification tool's 'Keyframes' option to split the video into multiple keyframes. We used the
link to the tweet made by Ranjeet Kumar Shukla, who has described himself as a 'proud Indian and Congressi' in his Twitter bio. Here's the result we got -
InVid lets users do reverse-image searches on Google using the keyframes generated from the video in a single click. One such keyframe gave us the following result -
The Google search result page had a video uploaded on YouTube titled 'Ranaghat station', and it was the exact video that is being shared as that of 'Gujrat migrants fleeing the state'. Here's the video uploaded on September 24, by a channel that goes by the name 'Esee News'.
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE: In the description of this video, the uploader has written - “Ranaghat station; 2018 September 22 8.30 am; Krishnanagar Bongaon local”. We did a Google search using the keywords 'Krishnanagar Bongaon local' and under the images tab, found the same video uploaded on September 23 with a caption that said, “Krishnanagar Bongaon Local
Ranaghat
Station today at 8:30 am.”
We then did a Facebook search using keywords ‘Ranaghat station’ and got a video uploaded by Facebook user Abhinandan Bhattacharjee. The post made on September 23 has, by now, been viewed over 2.2 million times.
We found a video on YouTube titled ‘Indian Railway Station: Ranaghat Junction’. We inspected the video and froze a frame and matched it with a frame in the video that is now viral with the fake claim. The angle of the two frames are different but this is enough proof that the station in question is indeed Ranaghat Junction and not a station in Gujrat. See the result -
Times Fact Check got in touch with the Chief Public Relations Officer of Eastern Railway RN Mahapatra and he confirmed that the video is of Ranaghat Junction railway station.
"This is a video of Ranaghat station taken on September 23 when a recruitment drive for female constables was on in Kolkata. This has nothing to do with any exodus of migrant workers," Mahapatra said.
VERDICTTimes Fact Check has confirmed that the video shared by many with a claim that it is of Gujrat migrants fleeing the state in fear is actually that of Kolkata's Ranaghat Junction railway station.