The video surfaced online and showed that 121 people, the vast majority of them women, were killed in a deadly stampede in Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh state.
AFP reported that the incident occurred during a packed Hindu religious gathering attended by more than 250,000 people, more than three times the 80,000 people that organizers had allowed.
Initially, officers blamed a sandstorm for the panic. But police later said the stampede began when “devotees started collecting soil” from the ground where popular preacher Bhole Baba had passed.
The same clip was shared along with similar false claims on Facebook here and here.
While the video does show an event for the same preacher, Bhole Baba, it took place in western India and the footage has been circulating since February 2024.
Old video
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the clip revealed that it matches the 7 minutes of a longer video shared to YouTube on February 9, 2024 (archived link).
The Hindi title of the video is: “Happy Day Rupbas Bharatpur Rajasthan ~ Hymns of Narain Sakar Hari”.
Narain Sakar Hari, alias Bhole Baba, is the same preacher whose religious gathering led to the deadly stampede on July 2 (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of the clip shared in the fake messages (left) and the YouTube video (right):
The title of the video mentions Rupbas, a village in Bharatpur district in the western Indian state of Rajasthan (archived link).
At 2:19 in the video, a bus stop sign with the name “Rupbas” and a sign for National Highway 123 can be seen. These match Google Street View images of the village (archived link):
Meanwhile, tractors can be seen in the video bearing the name of Ranjeeta Koli, a former MP for Bharatpur constituency (archived link).
