Guwahati: On Sunday, Team India marked an epic victory over Pakistan in the high-voltage ICC T20 World Cup match played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia. Former Indian skipper Virat Kohli emerged a hero in the hard-fought match as he scored an unbeaten 82 runs in just 53 balls.
Following the match, as cricket fans in the country celebrated India’s grand victory, some took to social media to troll Pakistan with memes and posts. Amid these memes and jokes, an image of a group of men waving Pakistani flags and holding a banner that read “We don’t want Kashmir give us Virat Kohli” went viral.
People sharing the image claim that after Pakistan’s defeat, fans of the country (Pakistan) wanted Virat Kohli instead of Kashmir.
Former Director General of Military Operation (DGMO) of Indian Army Lt Gen Vinod Bhatia shared the image on his Twitter handle on Monday with a caption that read, “Yeh mangane ki aadat! Kuch bhi nahi milega.” The tweet has accumulated over 43K likes and over 4.6K retweets. (see archived link here)
However EastMojo found out that the image is fake. The original photo has been edited to include the words “We don’t want Kashmir give us Virat Kohli”. We also found that the morphed image has been shared earlier on similar occasions.
Fact-check:
We ran a reverse image search on the viral photo on Google and Yandex. This led us to a number of related news reports. The original photo can be seen in this article published in India Today on August 2016.
The above comparison shows that in the viral image, the original photo has been photoshopped to replace the slogan “We want azaadi” with “We don’t want Kashmir give us Virat Kohli”.
According to India Today, Kashmiri youth had raised pro-Pakistan slogans in the Kashmir Valley following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
“The posters of Hizbul commander, Burhan Muzaffer Wani, slogans of azadi, map of Jammu and Kashmir, colored in green, are pasted on shutters of closed shops, poplar and willow trees. On the roads of the villages, youngsters have painted “Go India go back.” The youth and college students have been following this exercise everyday since July 8 when Burhan Wani was killed in a gunfight,” it had reported.
This also shows that the people holding the banner as seen in the original as well as the viral image are protestors from Kashmir, not Pakistani cricket fans as claimed by the trollers.
Not the First Time
It has been found that the original photograph has been tampered with several times and has been circulating on social media for many years now. According to a report published in 2017 in smhoaxslayer.com, a parody Twitter account, Sir Jadeja, has repeatedly edited the banner image.
On June 18, 2019 BOOM published a fact-check report where it had exposed similar claims made on social media after India defeated Pakistan in an ICC Cricket World Cup match in 2019.
“An image of Kashmiri protestors holding Pakistan flags and demanding ‘azaadi’ has been photoshopped to falsely claim that they are Pakistani cricket fans holding banners of ‘We don’t want Kashmir, give us Virat Kolhi’. The image is being shared after India defeated Pakistan in a recent match of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 with a false claim that Pakistani fans want Indian cricket team captain Kohli instead of Kashmir,” BOOM reported.
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