The first phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections saw a record-breaking 92 per cent voter turnout. Both the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have claimed that this turnout would work in their favour.
Now, ahead of the second phase of polling on April 29, a video of NRIs urging voters not to vote for the BJP has gone viral. An X account shared the video with the caption, “Highly educated Bengalees staying abroad in different countries across the world have a significant appeal to their fellow citizen in a unique way by promoting Bengali culture. ‘No vote to BJP’. Salutes to them”.
India Today Fact Check found that the video is from 2021. This anti-BJP campaign was from the West Bengal Assembly elections that year.
OUR PROBE
We ran a keyword search for recent anti-BJP campaigns by Bengalis living outside India, but found no reports. However, we found an X account called “No Vote To BJP” created in 2021. The account shared the viral video on April 24, 2021, and captioned it: “Bengalis across the world saying ‘No Vote To BJP’.”
We also found the video shared by the Instagram account and YouTube channel under the same name on the same day in 2021.
All three accounts featured several other videos that were part of the “No Vote To BJP” campaign.
According to a Times of India report, the campaign was set up by a group of political and civil rights activists in January 2021, ahead of the West Bengal Assembly elections that year. The same was reported by NDTV in a March 16, 2021 report. As per an analysis published in The Hindu, the campaign helped Mamata Banerjee’s TMC in registering a massive victory over the BJP in the 2021 state elections.
Notably, the same video has gone viral previously as well, once during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and once during the 2023 Karnataka Assembly polls.
Thus, it is clear that the viral video does not show an anti-BJP campaign for the ongoing state elections in West Bengal.
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