Fact Check: Viral video of mob vandalising vehicles is not from Kanpur
A video of migrant labourers vandalising cars and buses has gone viral claiming that the incident took place near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
Lakhs of migrants all over India have been desperately trying to reach their homes during the lockdown. With production and construction activities halted and left with little food and money, migrants have been making the arduous journey back home, often walking for hundreds of kilometres in the absence of proper transportation.
The railways later started Shramik Special trains and state governments started operating buses to bring migrants home. Amid this, a video of mob violence is going viral on social media with the claim that migrant labourers damaged vehicles near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
“Labourers attacking cars and buses near Kanpur in UP. This is the start of a civil war between the haves and the have nots. This is terrible. Hunger is bigger than Covid-19,” reads the claim along with the viral minute-long video.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that the video is not from Kanpur but Rajkot in Gujarat.
The video is quite viral on Facebook and Twitter. The archived version can be seen here.
AFWA probe
At the starting of the video, we found a red board on the roadside with “Shapar Veraval Industrial Association” written on it.
We ran a search on the Internet and found that Shapar Veraval Industrial Association (SVIA) is situated near National Highway 27 in Gujarat.
One can also see a PCR van with a Gujarat registration number starting with “GJ 18” at 53 seconds into the video.
We ran a search on the Internet with the keywords “Labourers attacking cars and buses+Shapar Gujarat” and found many media reports related to the incident which took place on May 17.
As per these reports, migrant labourers waiting for Shramik Special trains turned violent near the industrial clusters of Shapar and Veraval, adjoining Rajkot in Gujarat. They damaged more than a dozen trucks, buses, and cars, leaving five policemen and a TV reporter injured.
We also found a longer version of the video on Twitter, shot by the same man.
Hunger Games, Day-61, India; As days have gone by, police have been brutal, migrants hungry and desperate, the Middle-Class apathetic, and the rulers clueless and without a plan. Modi shot from the hip. The end result is the collapse of institutions and eruption of chaos. pic.twitter.com/DIww6fiPOv— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 20, 2020
On the same day, in Uttar Pradesh too, hundreds of migrant labourers blocked NH-2 at Raipura Jat village in Mathura district for an hour after they were stopped from continuing their journey. Many prominent media houses had covered this news.
But the viral video is not from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh as is being claimed but Rajkot in Gujarat.
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