Bhopal, Indore Sealed as COVID Cases Rise? No, Clip Is From 2020

An old video of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is being shared amid the rising number of COVID cases in the country to claim that the state government had decided to completely seal Indore and Bhopal. However, we found that the clip is from April 2020.

CLAIM

The caption along with which the aforementioned video is being shared reads: “मुख्यमंत्री ने इंदौर भोपाल उज्जैन को पूरी तरह सील करने के आदेश दिए | अब कोई भी इन शहरों में नहीं आ सकेगा ना बाहर जा सकेगा | अंतिम संस्कार के लिए भी लोग बाहर नहीं जा सकेंगे”

[Translation: Chief Minister has ordered Indore and Bhopal to be completely sealed. Nobody will be able to enter or leave these cities now; not even to perform last rites.]

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The video with the same claim is being shared on Facebook and Twitter. (Archived links of the same can be accessed here, here, here and here.)

WHAT WE FOUND

We searched Google with ‘MP Government Seals off Indore, Bhopal’ and found that there was no recent news report on the subject.

Next, we fragmented the viral video into multiple keyframes using the InVid Google Chrome extension and ran a reverse image search on one of the frames. This directed us to a news bulletin uploaded by ABP News on 9 April 2020, which carried the viral clip.

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Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the clip seen in the ABP bulletin and the clip which is being circulated on social media.

In 2020, the Madhya Pradesh government had completely sealed off Bhopal, Indore and Ujjain in view of the surge in coronavirus cases in the three cities.

Clearly, as India grapples with the second wave of COVID-19, an old clip from 2020 has been revived on social media with a false claim that the cities of Bhopal and Indore will go under complete lockdown.

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