By Archis Chowdhury
Suresh Chavhanke, the editor-in-chief and founder of right-wing news outlet Sudarshan News, posted a video on Twitter, where a person is seen offering namaz inside a bus, while passengers are seen queuing up outside. Chavhanke purportedly shared this as a footage from India, and claimed that the passengers were waiting outside for the driver to finish offering namaz.
However, BOOM found that Chavhanke’s claim is misleading; our fact-check reveals that the incident in the video is from Dubai, and not from India. Furthermore Dubai’s Department of Roads and Transport refuted the viral claims, and stated that the passengers were waiting outside due to the bus not being in operational hours yet.
The viral video has been shared on Twitter and Facebook with a caption in Hindi, that translates to English as, "Muslim driver is offering Namaz in A/C bus, so passengers are standing outside in the sun."
The video was viral with the exact same caption on Facebook as well, which can be viewed here, here, here and here.
Fact Check
While analysing the viral video, BOOM observed the words “Dubai” written on the bus, and also found that the bus number was ‘105’. Apart from this, we also found “Mall of Emirates” and “RTA” written on the visible side of the bus.
Taking cue from this, we searched with relevant keywords on YouTube, and found a video of the bus 105 running in Dubai, posted by a user. By comparing this bus to the one seen in the viral video, we found that they appeared to be the same bus, which confirms that this bus runs in Dubai, and not in any Indian city.
Following this, we searched with the keywords “RTA”, which was written on the side of the bus, and found it to be an acronym for Road and Transport Authority of Dubai.
This led us to the official Twitter account of the RTA, where we found a reply from this account, giving further details regarding this video. The RTA had responded to a Twitter account by the name of Dr Vedica, who had made a similar claim of passengers waiting outside the bus for the driver to finish offering namaz.
The RTA stated in the response, "We would like to clarify that after investigation, the bus was outside of operational hours during this time. As per RTA rules and regulations, nobody is allowed to enter the bus before or after the scheduled trip time in order to ensure a safe environment for both the driver and the passengers."
While investigating further, we found some users tagging a handle named 'Ujala' and claimed that this video was originally recorded by this user.
We found that this user had posted the same video on June 11, 2023, with the caption, "Bus driver in Dubai wanted 5 minutes to pray & people had no problem waiting for it. Good gesture. This is how humanity will survive with kindness. Imagine same thing happening in our country & the consequences of it online/offline."+
The RTA had provided a similar response to this tweet, clarifying that the passengers were waiting outside due to the bus not being operational. The user added further context to the video, and replied, "Hey! Thank you for services. Driver took us from Garden Of Miracle & dropped us at Dubai Mall. He took the permission after dropping all the passengers who were already in, closed the doors for 4-5 minutes for the prayers. After his prayer he opened the door & journey started."
BOOM reached out to the user on Twitter, who informed us that the video was recorded by her on May 24, 2023, at 7.06 PM. She also shared the metadata of the video, which confirms that the video was indeed originally recorded by her, along with the time and date of recording.
Adding further context, she said, “We were waiting for the number 105 bus at Garden of Miracles, which is also its starting stop. As soon as the bus arrived, the driver, after deboarding all the passengers sitting inside, requested the passengers boarding the bus to wait for five minutes to go towards Dubai Mall so that he could offer prayers. On which all the passengers agreed. After offering prayers, the driver made all of us passengers sit in the bus and took us to the last stop, Mall of Emirates. The bus reached the last stop on time."
Furthermore, we also looked at the 105 bus time-table on the RTA website, and found the departure time to be 7.10 PM from Garden of Miracle, with arrival time at the terminus Mall of Emirates at 7.47 PM. Ujala shared with us some pictures of the inside of the bus and its metadata, which confirm that the bus had reached Mall of Emirates on schedule.
BOOM could not independently conclude from the statements of Dubai Transport Department and Ujala whether the passengers were waiting on the request of the driver, or due to the bus not being operational. However, our investigation makes it abundantly clear that the bus picked up passengers from the starting stop Garden of Miracles and reached the final stop Mall of Emirates on time.
