Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government enacted new anti-conversion legislation last month, aimed at preventing marriages between Muslim men and Hindu woman in the garb of combating ‘love jihad’ cases. The law says that religious conversion by ‘coercion or temptation’ will be considered a non-bailable offence. On December 19, Rashid (22) was released after spending two months in prison following the testimony of the woman he was alleged to have forcefully converted that she married him willingly. In the midst of this, a video is being shared on social media with the claim that it shows an incident of ‘love jihad’. The clip shows a woman shouting at a man.
Facebook user ‘Hindu Tappu’ posted this clip and wrote, “A salute to this woman for perfectly explaining the real meaning of love jihad. Their aim is to increase their population through this. Hindu girls, beware.” It received 1,500 views at the time of writing. (Archive link)
[Warning: The video contains explicit language.]
इस महिला को सलाम
#Lovejihad का असली मतलब समझाते हुए। इनका उद्देश्य इनकी जनसंख्या बढा़ना है।
हिन्दू लड़कियाँ इसके बारे में जागरूक हो जाओ।Posted by Hindu Tappu on Sunday, December 13, 2020
Another Facebook user named Jeet also shared the video and accompanying claim. It garnered more than 12,000 views at the time of writing. (Archive link)
Fact-check
Alt News performed a reverse image search of a few frames from the viral video and found that it was tweeted on December 11, 2020. Twitter user ‘@KDJhaMRA’ had quote-tweeted an earlier tweet from August 4, 2019. This 2019 tweet stated that a woman named Shabnam Sheikh runs the Help Care Foundation in Mumbai. Based on this information, we found the Facebook page of the organisation. On December 2, 2018, the page shared a 28:33-minute long video. The viral clip has been cropped from here.
The woman sitting on the chair and shouting at others is Shabnam Sheikh. She is trying to mediate a quarrel between a married couple. According to the clip, the husband and wife’s names are Fatima and Imran, which establishes that they belong to the same religion. The cropped portion used for the viral video appears towards the end of the longer clip. Shabnam also uploaded the video on YouTube.
Comparing the screenshots from both clips confirms that it was indeed shared two years ago.
The video was earlier fact-checked by Boomlive on December 16.
Therefore, social media users are falsely sharing a two-year-old unrelated clip of a couple quarrelling as proof of an alleged ‘love jihad’ incident.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
