A video clip claiming to show Pushpa Kamal Dahal ’Prachanda’, chairman of CPN-Maoist Center, being attacked in Gorkha district during his campaign for the November 20 election, has gone viral on TikTok.
TikTok user ‘chandrakc5678’ shared a 28-second video on November 4, 2022, with the comment: “Prachanda finds it difficult to save his life. Stones and shoes have been hurled at him. Let’s stop him from when he launched the war. Hail Gorkha! I salute the people of Gorkha.”
In the video clip, Prachanda is seen surrounded by security personnel and cameras. He then moves through the chaos towards an awaiting van. With assistance from his security personnel; he enters the vehicle.
The video amassed more than 100,000 likes, and 932 comments and was shared more than 6,000 times. Twitter users also shared the same video. A Twitter user ‘@tikaram1988’ shared the video with the caption: “This is probably what Prachanda Path is.” The tweet received more than 300 likes and was retweeted 59 times. It has already been taken down.
On November 4, 2022, janaaastha.com published a news report headlined ’Maoist Chairman attacked in the electoral constituency’. Even though the website took down the report, it was archived on Wayback Machine, the digital archive of the internet.
Does the video show an attack on Prachanda during his election campaign in Gorkha?
Fact-check
To ascertain the claim’s veracity, we conducted a digital investigation. First, we googled the keywords: “attack on Prachanda” [in Nepali].
We found a news report titled ’Attack on Prachanda, security guard injured’ posted on Annapurna Post‘s Facebook account on January 20, 2015. However, the link didn’t open. After looking up the URL on Wayback Machine, we found the same news report on Annapurna Post. According to the report, there was an attack on Prachanda somewhere between Baneshwar and Bijuli Bazaar, Kathmandu, when he was headed to Bijuli Bazaar from Parliament in New Baneshwor to.
Then, using the [all in Nepali] keywords ‘Attack on Prachanda’, ’Bijulibazar Prachanda’, and ‘Baneshwor Prachanda’, we conducted a YouTube search. We found a video published three years ago with a caption that said: ‘Attempted deadly attack on Prachanda in Baneshwor’. After tallying the video with the viral one, we ran a reverse image search on the thumbnail photos of the second video. We reverse-image searched the thumbnail images of the second video after compared them to the viral video. It directed us to a ’Prachanda Protect by Police’ video posted on Onlinekhabar‘s YouTube channel on January 20, 2015.
We googled the keywords ’Attack on Prachanda [in Nepali] Onlinekhabar.com’. We found a news report of the incident published on January 20, 2015, along with the same YouTube video.
According to the news report, the incident took place when Prachanda was travelling from New Baneshwor to Bijuli Bazaar. He was supposed to speak at a rally his party had planned for the afternoon of January 15, 2015.
On the afternoon of January 15, 2015, he was scheduled to address a protest organised by his party. The party had called for a nationwide strike against the government’s decision to push the passage of the new constitution without its support. Prachanda was supposed to announce the end of the strike but returned to his home in Lazimpat without addressing the event, according to news reports. “Maoist cadres went berserk as they attempted to go near their leaders, breaking a barricade by police,” the Nepal Times reported.
| Claim | Claimed by | Nepal Check Verdict |
A video clip shows people attacking Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, chair of the CPN (Maoist Center) and a candidate from Gorkha constituency during an election campaign. | Social media users | Misleading |
NepalCheck.Org 
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