The message appeared as Bangladesh struggled with severe flooding who have at least 40 people killed and left nearly 300,000 people are seeking refuge in emergency shelters (archived link).
The floods came less than three weeks after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was ousted after fleeing by helicopter to India, her government’s biggest political patron, amid a student-led uprising.
She was replaced by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who heads an interim government facing the enormous task of implementing democratic reforms ahead of expected new elections.
Asif Mahmud, a leader of the student protests that ousted Hasina and who now serves in Yunus’s interim cabinet, accused India of “causing a flood” by deliberately releasing water from dams (archived link).
The Ministry of External Affairs of India rejected the accusation, saying its own catchment had experienced its “heaviest rainfall this year” in the same week, and that the water flow downstream was the result of “automatic discharges” (archived link).
Floods and landslides During the same period, more than 20 people were killed in the northeastern Indian state of Tripura.
The photo of the Hindu temple in India has also been shared alongside similar claims on X And Facebook.
Incorrectly displayed photo
A reverse image search on Google revealed that the photo is old. It had been flipped horizontally from a photo published by the English language newspaper The Hindu on August 24, 2019 (archived link).
“The Kapil Muni temple on Sagar Island in the Sunderbans, which sees a large number of devotees gather every year during the Gangasagar fair, is under threat from rising sea levels and will be submerged in the coming years,” the report reads in part.
Below is a screenshot comparing the circulating photo (left) and the photo published by The Hindu (right) with the matching features highlighted by AFP:
The photo was also published by the Indian news organization Down to earth on September 11, 2019 (archived link ).
The Sundarbans region extends from the southeastern part of West Bengal in India to the southern region of Bangladesh (archived link).
AFP was able to confirm the location of the Kapil Muni temple by conducting a search on Google Maps which shows similar street scenes on Sagar Island in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of the photo in the fake messages (left) and the accompanying Google Maps Street View (right), with features highlighted by AFP:
