As the date of election is approaching there is a huge rush among the political parties. Recently, a video took the internet by storm. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s election rally in West Bengal is viral, claiming that “BJP workers had to distribute money to mobilize Yogi Adityanath’s rally in Bengal”. In the video, some people on the motorcycle are seen coming out in the queue, while some men present there are seen giving an envelope to every bikeman.
Posting this video, a Facebook user wrote in the caption, “The BJP’s public face seeing the real face of BJP workers sharing money late at night to gather crowds at Yogi’s rally in West Bengal!! BJP’s BJP in Bengal The soup will be clean “. On Twitter too, people are sharing this video as saying of West Bengal.
The video shows a few men distributing cash to people and it is being falsely claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is distributing money to galvanise crowds for Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s rally in the poll-bound state. After fragmenting the video into multiple keyframes and running a reverse image search on one of those frames, it directed to an extended version of the same video uploaded on YouTube on 17 October 2019 with the caption: “Jan Ashirwad Yojna: New scheme of Raghuvar Das government, attend the rally to earn Rs.500”. It was found that the text written on the T-shirts of the people seen in the video, reads: ‘Abki baar 65 paar,’ (This time, we will cross 65 seats), which was the BJP’s tagline during 2019 Jharkhand elections. The same video was also published in a report by a local website on 17 October 2019, which claimed that the cash is being distributed by BJP volunteers. This same video had gone viral in January 2020 with another false claim that BJP workers were distributing cash to the protesters at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh.
Hence, it is an old video which could be traced back to October 2019, has been revived with false claim that people were paid to attend Adityanath’s West Bengal rally.
