Lighthouse Journalism found a video being widely shared on the social media websites. The caption of the video suggested chief minister of Maharashtra, Eknath Shinde had visited Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai and that he also offered a saffron coloured sheet and even an aarti plate could be seen. During the investigation we found the claim to be false. The video is not recent and not from Haji Ali Dargah but from Malanggad.
Claim:
X user Professor (Dr) K K Pandey shared the viral claim on his profile.
Check the archive version of the post.
Other users too are sharing the video with the same claim.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by uploading the video in the InVid tool and obtaining screengrabs to run a reverse image search on the keyframes.
During the reverse image search we found a tweet.
The caption stated that he visited Malanggad to perform, ‘aarti’ and not Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai.
We also found a news report about the same.
We found the video of the aarti being performed on the Instagram profile of Mahesh Patil.
It was the man who was seen performing aarti alongside CM Eknath Shinde.
We found several video stories too about the CM Eknath Shinde performing aarti at Malanggad.
Chief minister Eknath Shinde had raked up the issue of Malanggad earlier this year, which a section of the Hindus claim to be a temple, and vowed to “liberate” it. Shinde’s remarks have sparked a new controversy over the decades-old issue.
Malanggad is located in Kalyan in Maharashtra’s Thane district.
In the next step of investigation we connected with Shiv Sena spokesperson Kiran Pavaskar who confirmed that the video is from Malanggad where CM Eknath Shinde performed aarti.
Conclusion: Old video of Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde performing aarti at Malanggad recirculates as recent, claimed to be from that of Haji Ali Dargah in Mumbai. Viral claim is false.
