On August 25, a video surfaced on Facebook where a group of people were seen to be vandalising a statue of Dr BR Ambedkar. The video was posted by an account named Pushp Mitr Shung, with a caption in Hindi which stated that a group of people, who were chanting ‘Insha Allah’ destroyed the Ambedkar statue and claimed that the incident took place in Wayanad district of Kerala.
As per the caption, the people vandalising the statue were also asked to chant ‘Jai Bheem’. Two weeks since it was uploaded on Facebook, the video managed to attain around 1.3 lakh views as well as over 4,600 shares.
However, it has been found that the incident did not take place in Kerala’s Wayanad but in the coastal town of Vedaranyam in the Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu. A closer observation of the video will show that all the banners and the names of the shops are in Tamil.
According to a report by the Hindustan Times on August 25, the violence broke out in Vedaranyam after a car belonging to a man named Pandian, an Other Backward Caste (OBC) leader, was put on fire. The incident is reported to have taken place following an argument between Pandian and a dalit man named Rajendran.
A police officer was quoted by HT to have said, “Pandian and Rajendran, who is a Dalit, had a tussle earlier. To take revenge, Dalit men attacked Pandian and fired at his car. As upper castes are dominant in Vedaranyam, they gathered at the spot immediately.Since Dalits attacked Pandian and set fire to the car, a set of Caste-Hindus vandalised Ambedkar statue.”
Unlike what was mentioned in the Facebook post by Push Mitr shung, the vandalism had nothing to do with any Muslim groups and it did not take place in Wayanad.