A staged video created to raise awareness about wearing a helmet while riding, has been cropped and shared with a false claim that it shows Muslim youth getting aggressive when asked to wear a helmet. However, it was found that the said video is not of a real incident but was staged by one Raghvendra Kumar to spread awareness on road safety among the Muslim population of Kaimur district in Bihar.
Raghavendra Kumar aka Helmet Man – who had conceptualised and shot the video, confirmed that the incident was scripted.
The viral video shows that a man stops two motorcycle-borne youths on their way to a mosque and ask them why they aren’t wearing helmets. The man, speaking in Hindi, tells the youngsters to go back to their home and come back with helmets and only then would he allow them to go for their prayers. At this point the youngsters, wearing skull caps, call their friends over phone who rush to their ‘rescue’ with guns and swords. There’s a commotion and people can be seen waving their swords. At one point in the video the man can be heard referring himself as Helmet Man. Later in the video, the man and his team try to raise awareness on the importance of wearing helmet but the youngsters become more and more aggressive. A Hindi caption with the viral video shared on Facebook translates to ‘The result of Madarasa education. The other name of radicalisation is Islam. Muslims are being nurtured in the embrace of hatred. Mahasena is against such violence’.
The viral video is splitted into multiple keyframes using the InVid Google Chrome extension and a reverse image search was run on one of the frames. This directed directly to a YouTube video uploaded by Helmet Man. The video was uploaded on 20 March, and is an extended version of the viral video. A person in the video can be seen educating a bunch of Muslim youth about the importance of wearing a helmet while driving. Raghvendra Kumar, the ‘Helmet Man’ said that after losing his brother in a road accident, he has been committed to the cause of road safety. As part of one of his initiatives, he visited the Kaimur district in Bihar where the Maulvi of a mosque and some local youth helped film a video to spread awareness on the importance of wearing a helmet.
Thus, a video aimed at spreading awareness around road safety in Bihar was shared with a misleading claim to give the situation a communal colour.
