2016 Photo Of Inter-Faith Couple Falsely Linked To Kapil Mishra's Sister

An old photograph of a newly-wed couple is viral on internet with captions falsely claiming that the bride in the picture is Bharatiya Janata Party leader kapil Mishra's sister, who has married a Muslim man.

BOOM contacted BJP leader Kapil Mishra who refuted the viral claims. We also tracked the viral picture to 2016 wherein a Hindu girl had married a Muslim man in Mandya, Karnataka. The inter-faith marriage had been widely reported in the media back then.

The picture has been shared with a Hindi caption which translates to 'Sister of Kapil Mishra, who instigated the Delhi riots, marries a Muslim man Shahzad Ali'.

(Hindi: दिल्ली दंगे भड़काने वाले कपिल मिश्रा की बहन ने की एक मुसलमान लड़के शहज़ाद अली से शादी)

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The false claim is aimed at the BJP leader's alleged role in the Delhi riots that had claimed at least 53 lives in February earlier this year.

Mishra had organised a demonstration in Delhi's Maujpur area in support of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 on February 23, 2020 wherein he had said, in the presence of a police officer, that the anti-CAA protesters should be evicted from protest sites within three days failing which 'they would not listen even to the police'.

The posts can be seen here and here and their archived version can be checked here and here.

BOOM had received the same picture, overlaid with music, on its tipline number.

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Fact Check

BOOM contacted Kapil Mishra who refuted the viral claims regarding his sister's marriage to a Muslim man. "The viral claims are fake and the photograph of some random wedding is being used linking it to my sister," Mishra told BOOM.

"I have three sisters of which two are married. Neither my sisters nor the distant ones are married to a Muslim," Mishra added.

Viral Picture

BOOM then ran a reverse image search on the photograph and found that the picture of the same couple clicked from a slightly different angle had been used in a 2016 article published in Mangalore Today. The article was reporting the marriage of a Hindu woman to a Muslim man.

According to news reports, Ashitha Babu and Shakeel Ahmed, both from Mandya in Karnataka, had entered into a marriage on April 17, 2016 after 12 years of courtship.

A report published in the Indian Express on April 24, 2016, mentions that the family, while initially hesitant to the idea of the marriage, finally agreed when they saw the couple's resolve. The report further mentions that Ashitha Babu had converted to Islam and took the name Shaista Sultan before the wedding.

The marriage met with stiff resistance at the hands of pro-Hindu organisations including Vishwa hindu Parishad, according to the Express report, who took to the streets protesting against the inter-faith alliance claiming it to be a matter of 'love jihad'.

Watch below an NDTV report on the marriage.

The marriage was solemnised under police protection on April 17, 2016 in Mysuru.

Read more about it here.

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