Video of a Mock Drill by Jharkhand Police is Falsely Shared as Police Firing on Farmers in Mandsaur

On the X platform (previously known as Twitter), a video of a mock drill Jharkhand police is making the rounds under the misleading pretense that it is from the Mandsaur shooting Kand, in which six farmers were shot during a protest.

On November 12, an Ambedkarite account with the username Rekha posted (Archived link) a video purporting to show police shooting at civilians. The account claimed that the video is from the Mandsaur 2016 shooting Kand, in which the police had shot six protesting farmers.. The user wrote, “In 2016, the Shivraj government had shot 6 farmers in Mandsaur over farmers demanding the right price for their produce. The same government is now becoming farmer friendly.”

2016 में अपनी उपज का सही दाम मांग रहे किसानों के ऊपर शिवराज सरकार ने मंदसौर में 6 किसानों को गोली मारी थी यही सरकार अब किसान हितेशी बन रही है।@VipinWankhede_ #MPElection_2023 #MPElections2023 #BJP_jawat_He pic.twitter.com/2W17HfwLdN

— REKHA (@RekhaAmbedkar21) November 12, 2023

Moreover, on November 9, another handle Prashant Yadav (Archived link), who according to his bio is the district president of NSUI, a student wing of the Indian National Congress, had shared the same video along with a caption in Hindi which translates to, “Farmer brothers! Remember how bullets were fired on farmers in Mandsaur at the behest of Shivraj Singh and the BJP government.”

किसान भाइयों !
मंदसौर में किसानों पर कैसे शिवराज सिंह और भाजपा सरकार के इशारे पर गोलीया चलाई गई थी याद रखना।#KissanVirodhiShivrajSarkar pic.twitter.com/4OWbKy0ZaH

— Prashant Yadav (@prashanty76) November 9, 2023

The video was also shared by another handle, Manjeet Ghosh (Archived link). The tweet has so far garnered 2.3k likes.

कही किसान भाई भूल तो नहीं गये pic.twitter.com/yYFbwYDF6u

— Manjeet Ghoshi (@ghoshi_manjeet) November 13, 2023

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Fact Check

In the start of our research, we used the InVid plugin tool and several keyframes were acquired. After that, we performed a reverse image of the keyframes that had been extracted from the video, which led us to the same YouTube video. It was discovered that the video, titled “Moke Dreal of Khunti Police,” was uploaded on November 1, 2017.

A red structure building with the “Jagdamba Steel” shop was visible in the YouTube video. Subsequently, we used a Google map search to locate the “Jagdamba Steel Khunti Jharkhand” and discovered that it exists in Khunti. Additionally, the surrounding buildings in the video matched with the structures next to the “Jagdamba steel” shop.

Moreover, there are few other factors which makes it evident that the video is of mock drill conducted by the Khunti police: the people in the crowd are seen standing calmly, there is no choas when the police is shooting, and some of them are even using their phones to capture the mock drill. Hence, the claim made the X users is misleading as the video is of a mock drill by Jharkhand police.

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