No, Congress MLA Aslam Shaikh’s men did not disrupt Durga Puja in Mumbai in this video

A 32-second video is viral with the claim that ‘Jihadis’ went inside a Durga Puja pandal in Mumbai and interrupted the festivities. In the video, a man wearing a blue shirt enters the pandal along with another man and asks people to stop the music. Later, the same man can be heard saying, “If you want to live in the colony, you will have to chant Aslam Bhai Aslam Bhai. Modiji won’t come here, only Aslam Bhai will.” Twitter handle @MyBharat9 tweeted the video with the same claim. At the time of writing this article, the tweet garnered over 2,600 retweets. (archive link) Columnist Shefali Vaidya also quote-tweeted the video and asked, “Is this for real”.

Is this for real? https://t.co/6518FEGrMA

— Shefali Vaidya. (@ShefVaidya) October 19, 2020

On Twitter, several other users including Babli Pandey, @Kreately Media and Richa Rajpoot posted the video with the same claim.

देखिये कैसे जिहदीयो ने नहीं मानने दिया #दुर्गापूजा #मुंबई pic.twitter.com/mBfYV9WKzW

— Kreately (@KreatelyMedia) October 18, 2020

It may be noted that Congress MLA Aslam Shaikh has been elected thrice from the Malad West Assembly Constituency in Mumbai.

The video was also shared on Facebook with identical narrative. Best Hindi News published an article on the video, on October 19, 2020, reiterating the social media claims.

दुर्गा पंडाल में घुसकर भजन बंद करवा कर बोला,
“कॉलोनी में रहना है तो असलम भाई कहना है, यहां मोदी नहीं आएगा !”

मलाड मुंबई की घटना !

Posted by Saurabh Singh on Sunday, 18 October 2020

Fact-check

With a keyword search, we found that the same video was shared last year with the claim that members of the Muslim community interrupted Durga Puja celebrations. Media outlets like News Nation, Swarajya (now deleted), OpIndia, and InKhabar passed it off with this claim. Postcard News founder Mahesh Vikram Hegde also promoted the claim in 2019. InKhabar alleged that the video is from Mumbai’s Malad area. According to its report, the person wearing a blue shirt is associated with Aslam Shaikh.

The claim, however, is false.

On October 11, BBC Hindi published a fact-check report stating that the man in blue shirt is Ashish Singh. As per his Facebook profile, Singh is the owner of Kings Fitness gym and the vice president of Yuva Ekta Samajik Sanstha.

Alt News contacted Ashish Singh to know the details of what exactly transpired. “I was jokingly creating a video similar to Tik-Tok clips. On that day around 1 PM, my friends and I were sitting together and discussing the elections. This was ahead of Maharashtra assembly elections. We were speculating that Aslam Shaikh is destined to win the elections. We made the video to have fun. But the clip was picked up on social media and shared with the claim that Durga Puja festivities were interrupted for Azaan. The video was falsely linked to Aslam Shaikh and shared online ahead of Maharashtra polls. However, the claim isn’t true at all. The video was given a Hindu-Muslim narrative. We had registered a complaint against social media misinformation,” he said.

Singh further added, “The video is viral once again before Bihar elections.” When asked about the other individuals, he said, “The person with whom I am speaking to in the video is Ravishankar Dubey and the one standing with me is my friend Nadeem Shaikh.”

Last year, Singh had tweeted about the complaint filed by him and his friend Ravishankar Dubey. In another tweet, he can be seen alongside Dubey in a video where they reiterate the sequence of events as explained to Alt News.

@INCMumbai @BJP4Maharashtra @bjp4mumbai pic.twitter.com/K5FoEfMRW2

— Ashish Singh Raghuvanshi (@ashraghuvanshi) October 9, 2019

Ashish also informed that a complaint was filed against him after the video went viral with false claims. However, the complaint was quashed after he and his friend clarified the details to the police.

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