A video showing a woman in a crowd of protesters while raising her voice using a loudspeaker is viral with the false claim that it shows a Hindu woman in Bangladesh protesting against the assault on Hindus in the country following the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government.
BOOM found that the woman in the viral video is Bangladeshi actress Azmeri Haque Badhon, who hails from the Muslim community, and can be seen supporting the student protesters against the Sheikh Hasina government.
Bangladesh had slid into massive unrest and political chaos after Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country surreptitiously on August 5. Reports of violence against the minorities have surfaced amidst massive law and order breakdown, vandalism, looting and killings of members of the previous regime of Awami League. Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged economist and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who took charge as the head of Bangladesh's interim government on August 8, to ensure safety of Hindus and other minorities.
The viral video, where a woman can be seen using a loudspeaker to say, "This is our country. It will be fixed by us." The video also contains a date-stamp which reads "12/8/2024", along with a Hindi text, which translates to English as, "Brother, listen to the roar of the Bangladeshi Hindu tigress Jai Shree Ram."
The video was shared with a caption, which read, "Video from Bangladesh. Hindu Women crying 😭 as they are saying either convert or leave Bangladesh." It also included a Hindi text, which translated to English as, "Hindus, support wholeheartedly. Bangladesh Hindus need us, tomorrow you will also need us, 57 countries are united."
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The same video was also shared with the same caption on Threads.
Fact Check
BOOM went through responses to the viral tweets, and found many users stating that the person in the video is a Bangladeshi actress called Azmeri Haque Badhon, who is seen protest in support of the students, against Sheikh Hasina's government.
Taking cue from this, BOOM did a keyword search in Bangla, and came across a YouTube video captioned, "What Ajmeri Haque Bandhan said on Rajpath | Azmeri Haque Badhon Protest."
In the video, the same woman wearing the exact same clothes as seen in the viral video can be seen speaking to the media, and explaining that she us going under a lot of duress.
Taking cue from the caption, BOOM did another keyword search, and found multiple other videos of Badhon speaking to the media at Rajpath, during a protest against the government on August 1, 2024.
In one of the videos from the protest, published by mytv Bangladesh, Badhon can be seen wearing the exact same clothes, holding the same loudspeaker as seen in the viral video. While speaking to the media, she is head saying, "As long as the students are in the streets, I am with them."
We also found a news report by Aajker Patrika, which contained an image from the protest that closely matched the keyframes in the viral video. Comparing the two, we found that the people in both the images, the clothes they are wearing, and the banner they are holding - are all matching.
The article quotes Badhon as saying, "A state that openly shoots innocent people indiscriminately, a state that makes mass arrests indiscriminately, that state can never be a reflection of a democratic state system. This state cannot provide us security, the state has to take the responsibility. My daughter could have been in the place of the dead children, I could have been in the place of those people. The state should take this responsibility. We have to provide security. When I stand on the street for my rights, no one can oppress me. We have to get out of this politics. I don't have passport of any other country. I will stay in this country, I will stay with my rights, freedom. I will not be oppressed like this. My child will not grow up in this environment. We will do the reforms."
Furthermore, Badhon hails from the Muslim community, and is not a Hindu, as claimed in the viral captions.
