Fact Check: Video claiming cricketer Rohit Sharma’s fans heckled Hardik Pandya at airport is digitally altered

Hyderabad: Ahead of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2024, Hardik Pandya, on December 15, 2023, replaced Rohit Sharma as the captain of the Mumbai Indians (MI) cricket team. Pandya was appointed captain after MI got him back from Gujarat Titans in what some claim was the ‘biggest coup’ in IPL’s history. The change in leadership disappointed Sharma’s fans, who expressed their anger by setting Mumbai Indians jerseys and caps on fire.

Now, an Instagram video, dated December 24, of Hardik Pandya walking into an airport is circulating on social media. It has the audio of people shouting in unison ‘Mumbai ka raja, Rohit Sharma’ (Rohit Sharma is the king of Mumbai)’. The accounts sharing the video suggest that Pandya was heckled at an airport.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the audio of people shouting slogans for Rohit Sharma was edited into the video.

We ran a keyword search on Instagram and found an extended version of the video posted by the verified account Instant Bollywood on November 29, 2023. It did not feature any sloganeering calling Sharma ‘King of Mumbai’. However, it featured a Hindi hip-hop song, which is most probably non-diegetic – any type of sound that does not specifically exist in the video, such as a voiceover or background music. The video’s caption stated that Pandya was spotted at the airport.

Another Instagram account, Goat Men Fashion, posted the video on December 2, 2023. It also did not feature sloganeering but featured a Hindi song as background music added digitally.

Finally, we traced the audio of sloganeering to a video of an audience encouraging Rohit Sharma in a stadium during a match, uploaded on YouTube on January 18, 2020.

Hence, we conclude that an old video of Hardik Pandya at an airport was edited to make it look like he was heckled by Rohit Sharma’s fans.