Claim: A video shared on social media shows Bangladeshi Muslims chanting pro-Pakistan slogans in a rally.
Fact: The claim is false on three accounts:
- The caption is unrelated to the video, as the video does not show people raising pro-Pakistan slogans.
- The slogans that can be heard in the video claim are against Bangladesh’s former prime minister Khaleda Zia. However, this audio, too, is digitally altered and was likely superimposed onto the video.
- The video is not from the recent protests in Bangladesh. It is from 2022 and shows a rally that was held to remember Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s death and the party workers killed in the 21 August 2004 grenade attack.
On 8 August, Trunicle- a Hindi news outlet – posted a video (archive) on X (formerly Twitter), with the caption, “Pakistan is in our Blood and we want to go Pakistan.” chant Bangladeshi Muslims”. The video shows a large crowd, dressed in black, marching and chanting slogans in Bangla.
Bangladesh Revolution 2024
At the start of July 2024, students of Dhaka University launched protests, demanding an end to the government’s quota system, which reserved 30% of civil service posts for relatives of veterans who had served in the 1971 War of Independence. By 15 July, the protests turned violent and the government’s increasingly deadly response fueled their anger further, according to CNN.
According to this timeline of the events, by 4 August, at least 90 or more unarmed protesters were killed during clashes, and internet services were suspended. Students from all parts of the country subsequently announced a plan to march to Dhaka to force the government to resign.
On 5 August, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed ended her 15-year regime, resigned, and fled to India after which the Chief of the Bangladesh Army announced the formation of a new government. On 7 August, at the request of the student leaders, the Nobel Peace Laureate Mohammad Yunus was sworn in as the Chief Advisor to the new interim government.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse-image search on the keyframes of the video which led to a YouTube video by a Bangladeshi channel posted on 31 August 2022. The video shows the same group of people, albeit in a slightly different location, walking and chanting slogans in Bangla.
The video’s description, when translated into English, reads, “A mourning rally was held on the initiative of Cox’s Bazar District Chhatra League to protest the National Day of Mourning and the 21 August grenade attack. On Tuesday (30 August), General Secretary Maruf Adnan conducted the rally under the chairmanship of Cox’s Bazar District Chhatra League President SM Saddam Hussain”. The slogans were likely chanted in remembrance of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman – founder of Bangladesh and Hasina Wazed’s father. However, Soch Fact Check has not confirmed this translation with a native speaker.
However, we conducted a keyword search in Bangla, on “Cox’s Bazar and Chhatra League protest”. The results led us to a news article, published on 30 August 2022, by a Bangladeshi website Ukhiyan News. According to an English translation of the article, it stated that the rally was carried out in Cox’s Bazar – a city in Bangladesh. It was organised by Chhatra League – the student wing of Awami League on the occasion of National Day of Mourning and the 21 August 2004 grenade attack, the publication added. A picture depicting the same people and landmarks (bottom) as that of the viral video (top) can be seen below:
Similar landmarks and people in the screen grab of a viral video and picture from 2022
Furthermore, we noted that the audio of this YouTube video does not match the audio of the video in the claim. Once it was confirmed that the video of the rally was from 2022, we tried to ascertain the truth behind the slogans that can be heard in the viral video.
For this purpose, Soch Fact Check reached out to Bangladeshi fact-checker Minhaj Aman who translated the chants in the viral video from Bangla to English. According to him, the people in the video can be heard chanting, “Pakistan Er Khaleda, Pakistan E Chole Ja”, which translates to “Khaleda of Pakistan, Go back to Pakistan”.
Aman pointed out to us that Khaleda Zia is the former prime minister, and the leader of the current opposition in Bangladesh, and that the sloganeering people are from the Awami League that was recently ousted by the student movement. Therefore, Soch Fact Check confirms that the video in the claim does not show Muslims in Bangladesh raising pro-Pakistan slogans. The caption is misleading/false as they can be heard chanting against Khaleda Zia.
It is also to be noted that Zia and her party Bangladesh National Party (BNP) were labelled as pro-Pakistan by Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League in the past.
Besides noting that the slogans do not match, we also found discrepancies in the quality of its sound.
Suspecting that the audio of the clip in the viral claim was fake, we reached out to an audio engineer at Soch Videos — a sister company of Soch Fact Check — who confirmed that it is digitally altered. According to his explanation, when people are chanting in a huge crowd during rallies and protests, their voices echo and the delay levels are high. However, in the viral video, the voices do not echo, giving the impression that the sound was recorded on a mic by several people and then imposed on the video, he added.
He also mentioned that there was enough distance between the crowd and the camera to cause the voices of the crowd to overlap, making it hard for us to hear them. But in the viral video, the camera seems to be close to the mic as we can hear the chants with unusual clarity, suggesting that a different audio clip was superimposed onto the video, he said.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, further confirms that the audio was altered and that the video in the claim does not originally show crowds chanting, “Khaleda of Pakistan, Go back to Pakistan”.
Virality
On X, the video garnered 684.8k views, 6,800 likes and 3,400 reposts. The archived versions can be seen here and here.
On Facebook, it was shared here, here and here.
Conclusion: A post claiming to share a video of Bangladeshi students chanting pro-Pakistan slogans during the recent protests, is false, and its audio is digitally altered too. The actual video is, in fact, from 2022 and shows a rally by the student wing of Awami League.
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Background image in cover photo: Getty Images
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