Fact check: It's not Bilawal Bhutto dancing to ‘Besharam Rang’ song, video shared with false claim
New Delhi, January 23
A video of two people dancing to the ‘Besharam Rang’ song at an event was recently shared on Twitter with the claim that the male dancer featured is Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto. However, a PTI fact check found the man in the clip is actually a media student in Karachi.
The song from Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan’s upcoming movie ‘Pathaan’ has been shared widely on social media since its trailer launch and has created a controversy because of its lyrics and costumes. The song has been a massive hit among Instagram users copying the dance steps in their reels.
The tweet with the video in question, which garnered over 863K views, more than 7,000 likes and 1,800 retweets, read: “Pakistan is in safe hands of leaders like Bilawal Bhutto…they want Kashmir… (sic).”
Pakistan is in safe hands of leaders like Billawal Bhutto…they want Kashmir…
😀😀 pic.twitter.com/LSKgeuB01d— ƤƦAƔЄЄƝ ƲƝƖƳAԼ (@ImPraveenUniyal) January 21, 2023
The PTI fact check team used an InVid Tool search to find details and a few keyframes of the video. A subsequent Google Reverse Image Search on one of the keyframes led to an Instagram post by Inaya Khan, a Pakistani social media influencer.
The video in the post, dated January 12, looked the same as the one posted on Twitter. The video that was tweeted was shot from a different angle when the dancers performed to the song.
The team noticed Inaya’s Instagram post, which read, “Besharam Rang dance Partner @mehrozbaigofficial.” The male dancer Inaya tagged in the post was found to be Mehroz Baig, another Pakistani Instagram user with 21.3K followers.
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The fact check team scanned Baig’s Instagram profile and found that Inaya tagged him in another dance video from the same event. The caption of the video, posted on January 19, suggested that both of them performed on the occasion of the wedding ceremony of Inaya’s sister.
The team subsequently reached out to Mehroz Baig, who was mistaken as Bilawal Bhutto in the video, over email. Baig confirmed to PTI that it was him performing at a wedding event with Inaya Khan.
“I am a bachelor’s in media studies student from the Iqra University in Karachi. This event shown in the video was organised on Jan 8 at Karachi’s Sunset Club, where I performed with Inaya khan at her sister’s wedding,” Baig told PTI.
The team then reached out to Pakistani journalist Lubna Jerar Naqvi, who confirmed that the man in the viral video was not Bhutto.
“Both Inaya Khan and Mehroz Baig have shared the video from their Instagram handles and YouTube channels. Surprisingly, many people who have verified accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube shared the video claiming it was a video of Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari,” Lubna told PTI.
Subsequently, the fact check team concluded that the man seen dancing in the video is not Bilawal Bhutto, as claimed in the Twitter post.
