An old video showing Hindu monks standing in a queue outside a polling booth is being shared on social media with the false claim that it is from recent Maharashtra municipal elections.
BOOM found that the viral video dates back to at least May 2024, during the Lok Sabha election, and visual clues such as Gujarati instructions in the background indicate that it is from Gujarat.
The Maharashtra municipal polls were held on January 15, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning 1,425 of the total 2,869 seats across 29 municipal corporations, and wresting control of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), emerging as the largest party with the BJP-led Mahayuti coalition crossing the majority mark.
The Claim: Video shows Hindu monks standing in a queue outside a polling booth during the 2026 Maharashtra municipal elections
The video is being shared on Facebook with an embedded caption which, when translated into English, reads, “You’ve probably seen many people wearing caps and burqas while voting, but take a look at this one too.”
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What We Found:
1) Video Predates Maharashtra Municipal election
We broke the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search. The results showed that the video dates back to at least May 2024 indicating it was taken during the Lok Sabha elections held that year.
The caption of a tweet from May 2024, read, "Scene of Voting yesterday by Swaminarayan Sect in Gujarat. As I had said, if you will do Vote Jihad, we will do Vote Pratigya!!"
The visuals in this post match those seen in the viral video.
2) Gujarati text instructions in the background, indicates it is from Gujarat.
At the four-second timestamp in the video, Gujarati-language instructions can be seen on the walls of the polling booth.
3) Old posts on Vadodara's Swaminarayan sect monks voting
Taking cues from the X post and the visuals, we found several old social media posts showing monks from the Swaminarayan sect voting in Vadodara, Gujarat, during the 2024 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Additionally, All India Radio’s official X handle had shared photos of Swaminarayan sect monks voting in Vadodara during the 2019 general elections.
