Following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s thumping victory in West Bengal, several videos allegedly showing illegal immigrants fleeing to Bangladesh have gone viral.
In this story, we will debunk two such videos.
Biswa Ijtema in Hooghly
This video shows hundreds of people walking down a road with bags. Several of them wore kurata-pyjamas and skullcaps. An X user shared the video and wrote, “Following the triumphant victory of the BJP in the West Bengal elections, a pronounced trend has begun to emerge. All Bangladeshi Islamists are now rapidly repatriating to their homeland with considerable alacrity.”
This video also featured a boy who said that the visuals were from Punian, Hoogly. He explained in the video that people from around the world had been coming for the last three days to attend the Biswa Ijtema, a Muslim congregation.
Using this clue, we came across a report published in The Statesman on January 3. According to the newspaper, Biswa Ijtema was held in Puinan, Dadpur, Hooghly, West Bengal. It is one of the world’s largest Islamic congregations, which is estimated to draw between 5 and 10 million participants from across the globe.
Reverse-searching the keyframes from the videos led us to a post by Deep Ghosh, the boy seen in the video, shared on Instagram on January 5. Ghosh stated in the post that the video showed the crowd going to the Biswa Ijtema in 2026.
This confirms that the video does not show Bangladeshi migrants fleeing West Bengal after the BJP’s victory.
Video from Bangladesh
Another video of skullcap-wearing people assembled at a place with bags was also widely shared. An X user wrote, “Heavy crowds at railway stations in West Bengal…As soon as they saw the election results, the infiltrators themselves started fleeing Bengal for Bangladesh.”
Reverse-searching keyframes from the video led us to its longer version, shared by a Bangladeshi Facebook account called Launch Capture on November 30, 2025. According to the post, this video showed hundreds of worshippers boarding a boat after the Charmonai Mahfil.
We also found another version of the video in which people boarding a river boat are clearly visible. There are also buildings visible in this video. We geolocated the video and found it was shot around the Al-Karim Jame Mosque near the Rashidia Kamil Madrasah, a prominent Islamic educational institution in Charmonai, Bangladesh.
According to news reports, the Charmonai Darbar Sharif is a famous and popular place in Bangladesh, where every year many devotees participate in the Charmonai Mahfil.
Thus, we concluded that this video was not from India and did not show Bangladeshi migrants fleeing India.
– Ends
