Assam video shared as a Delhi protest is false, fact check

New Delhi (Desk), 18 Oct 2026 (IST) · Fact Check

Claim: A video circulating on social media in mid-October 2026 shows supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) gathering in Delhi in large numbers despite police restrictions, during protests against the Chief Election Commissioner.

Rating: False. The video is from Tinsukia in Assam, and it dates back to October 2025, a year before the Delhi protests. It shows a rally where tribal residents demanded Scheduled Tribe status, land rights and higher daily wages. The government's PIB Fact Check unit flagged it as old on 11 October, and the fact-checking team at The Quint traced its original upload.

Key points

• The viral clip was shared around 10–11 October as footage of CJP protesters in Delhi.
• A reverse image search leads to a Facebook upload from October 2025, captioned as a rally in Tinsukia, Assam.
• The location matches Tinsukia on Google Maps, according to The Quint.
• PIB Fact Check said on 11 October that the footage "dates back to October 2025, and is from Assam".
• Rating: False.

What the viral post claims

The clip shows a large crowd on a street, and was shared with captions saying it showed CJP supporters turning out in Delhi despite restrictions. It spread on the weekend of 10 and 11 October, when Delhi Police had sealed off Jantar Mantar, set up checkpoints and detained thousands of protesters, according to reports by Al Jazeera and others.

The clip carried no date, no visible street names and no audio that placed it in Delhi. That alone should have been a warning. But at a moment when people couldn't easily see what was happening on Delhi's streets, partly because mobile internet was suspended in parts of central Delhi on 10 October, a dramatic crowd video was always going to travel.

How the Delhi protest video was traced to Assam

The Quint's WebQoof team, in a fact-check published on 14 October, ran key frames from the video through Google Lens, a reverse image search tool. That led to a Facebook video posted in October 2025, captioned as a rally in Tinsukia, Assam, where tribal residents demanded Scheduled Tribe status, land rights and better daily wages.

They also found the same visuals shared on X on 11 October 2026 by another user with an unrelated caption about Assam. Finally, they geolocated the street on Google Maps and found it matched Tinsukia.

PIB Fact Check, the government's unit that responds to false claims involving central government matters, posted on 11 October that the video is old, that it "dates back to October 2025, and is from Assam", and that it was being falsely linked to the current situation in Delhi.

National Diaries reviewed the evidence published by PIB Fact Check and The Quint, including the October 2025 upload and the location match, and found it consistent. We've rated the claim on that basis.

What the video actually shows

Tinsukia is a district in eastern Assam, about 2,000 km from Delhi by road. Demands for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status, which brings reserved seats in education, jobs and legislatures, have been a recurring political issue in Assam for years, with several communities campaigning for it.

Tinsukia, in upper Assam, has a large population of Adivasi tea-garden workers, whose families were brought from central India by British planters in the 19th century. Their demand for ST status is one of the oldest of its kind in the state, alongside similar demands from five other communities: the Tai-Ahom, Moran, Matak, Chutia and Koch-Rajbongshi. Successive state and central governments have promised to settle the issue, and rallies like the one in the video are a regular part of Assam's politics.

The October 2025 rally had nothing to do with the Election Commission, the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls, or the CJP, which organised the Delhi protests a year later. Whatever one thinks of the protests, this video isn't evidence about them.

Why it matters: During fast-moving protests, old or unrelated videos shape what millions of people believe is happening, and can inflame tempers on both sides. For readers abroad, where this clip may have been shared as proof of the size of the Delhi protests, the lesson is the same: a crowd video without a date and a place is not evidence.

Fakes on both sides of the protests

This isn't the only false or misleading video about the voter-roll protests, and misinformation has run in both directions.

• A video presented as a male Congress worker assaulting a woman police officer actually showed two women, an NSUI office-bearer and a Delhi Police constable, The Quint found (rated misleading).
• A nearly three-minute video of a young woman criticising the CJP protests was computer-generated, not real footage, Factly and The Quint found.
• Videos of women standing in front of buses, shared as scenes from the protests, were also synthetic, made with image-generation software, according to The Quint.
• A video shared as Delhi Police attacking Rahul Gandhi's residence on 13 October showed violence during the anti-CAA protests in December 2019, The Quint found.
• A video claiming RSS members attacked a girl at a CJP protest was fake, the person shown being a boy, Organiser reported.

Why old videos keep coming back

This pattern isn't new, and it isn't unique to India. During almost every large protest, old crowd footage resurfaces with new captions, for a few simple reasons.

Crowd videos look alike. A packed street with flags and slogans could be almost anywhere in India, and most viewers can't tell Tinsukia from Delhi in a ten-second clip on a phone.

There's demand for proof. When people support a protest, they want evidence it's big; when they oppose it, they want evidence it's violent or staged. Recycled and synthetic videos serve both appetites.

Information gaps make it worse. When mobile internet is suspended or reporters can't get close, fewer real videos come out, and old ones fill the space.

And forwarding is easy while checking takes effort. Once a clip has been shared thousands of times, a correction rarely travels as far.

How to check a protest video yourself

Before sharing a video from any protest, a few quick checks catch most fakes:

• Look for a date and place you can confirm. Signboards, shop names, number plates, weather and landmarks often give it away.
• Reverse search a frame. Take a screenshot and use Google Lens, Bing Visual Search or a similar tool. If the same video appears months or years earlier, it isn't new.
• Check the uploader. Is it someone who was there, or an account that reposts everything?
• Check the season and the clothes. Weather, sunlight and what people are wearing often don't match the place and date claimed. A clip claimed to be from a protest last night should look like last night where it supposedly happened.
• Wait for confirmation. Reliable outlets and official accounts usually confirm major events within hours.
• Watch for signs of synthetic video. Distorted hands, garbled text, unnatural movement and faces that change between frames are common giveaways.

Protests are a test of what people believe as much as what they do. This one has been unusually crowded with misleading clips, from every side. Sharing a year-old crowd from Assam doesn't make a Delhi protest bigger; it just makes every real video that follows easier to doubt.