Old Ganesh Visarjan video falsely shared as West Bengal police celebrating BJP’s election victory

As the Assembly election results were declared in West Bengal, the BJP crossed the halfway mark, maintaining a substantial lead over the incumbent Trinamool. Against this backdrop, a video of some police officers dancing on the street is going viral on social media. The users who share the post claim that the police personnel are dancing in celebration of the BJP’s victory in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections.

Let’s check the truth.

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Fact check:

We started our investigation with a reverse image search on Google, and the results led us to a similar video uploaded on a YouTube channel under the title “Ganpati Visarjan Police Dance 2022 Kolhapur Part.”  It was uploaded in September 2022.

The video description indicates that it shows a police dance during Ganpati Visarjan in Kolhapur. Importantly, the original video does not include the BJP campaign song that is heard in the viral video, suggesting that the audio has been added from an external source.

By closely observing the video, we noticed that the names of multiple shops were visible in the background of the video. 

We searched online and identified the exact location seen in the video as Gangavesh Road in the Papachi Tikati area of Kolhapur using Google Maps Street View. 

Using these hints, we conducted further searches and found several media reports regarding this. On 11 September 2022, Navbharat Times reported that this is a video of Ganapati Visarjan in Kolhapur where police officers danced during the celebration. There was a 2-year ban on celebration of festivals due to COVID-19. After the COVID protocols were removed last year, everyone joined the Ganapati Visarjan. 

According to an India Today report, after this incident, the Mumbai police imposed a strict rule that no policemen are allowed to dance in uniform in Maharashtra, and action will be taken against those police officers who break the rules.

This makes it clear that an old video of Maharashtra police dancing on Ganapati Visarjan went viral as West Bengal Police celebrate the BJP victory in Assembly elections.

Conclusion

Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the video to be false. This video shows police personnel dancing during a Ganesh Visarjan procession in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. It dates back to September 2022.