By Swasti Chatterjee
A scripted interview sequence between a man and a woman in a burqa, where she says that she will remove her hijab in front of a dentist only if he treats her with closed eyes, is circulating as a real incident.
The video shows the man posing questions in Kannada on Islam and women wearing hijabs in schools and colleges. The woman in reply speaks about the Islamic traditions and explains why her face may remain covered even in a girls' college.
In the latter part of the video the interviewer poses a question about being treated by a male dentist. To this, the woman bizarrely replies that she would remove her hijab, however the dentist would have to close his eyes to avoid seeing her.
The video is being shared with captions taking a jibe at Muslim women wearing burqa and hijab.
Megh Updates, a right wing X account shared the video with the caption, "I will remove hijab while getting treated by a male dentist only if he closes his eyes during treatment."
Click here to view an archive of the X post.
The video has also been shared by several X handles with similar captions.
Clickhere, here, here for archives of the posts.
The video is circulating with similar captions on Facebook as well.
Fact Check
BOOM found a logo at the bottom left corner of the video with the text: TV Vikrama.
We then looked up TV Vikrama on YouTube and found a channel with the same logo with more than 4.6 lakh subscribers. We also found a longer version of the video posted by the channel on February 18, 2022.
The video has a disclaimer in Kannada which states that it is a fictional interview.A translation of the disclaimer notice from the video can be seen below.
Using the translate feature of Google Lens we translated the above disclaimer and found that it says, the video shows a fictional interview to spread awareness among people. The translated description reads, "Note: This fictional interview is an attempt to give some message to some children when they are destroying their future by thinking that religion is the biggest thing while they are getting education...."
The actors in the video are Keerthi and Mumthas. An interview of Keerthi can be seen here. Several other videos of Mumthas of TV Vikrama can be seen here.
