A post is being widely circulated on X (formerly Twitter) with a video showing a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate being garlanded with shoes by an elderly man. The post claims that the clip is related to the ongoing Bihar Assembly elections.
The Bihar elections are being conducted in two phases, on 6 and 11 November 2025, while the counting of votes and result announcement will take place on 14 November 2025.
What's the claim?: The viral post claims that the video shows recent visuals from the ongoing Bihar elections, suggesting that people were protesting against the BJP candidate following initial vote projections.
However, the claim is false.
The video is not related to the Bihar elections.
It is an old clip from Madhya Pradesh that has repeatedly resurfaced with false captions during different election cycles.
How did we find out the truth?: We extracted key frames from the video and ran a reverse image search on Google.
The results led us to a 2018 post by ANI, which reported that the incident took place in Dhamnod, a town in Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar district.
According to ANI’s 2018 post, Dinesh Sharma, a BJP candidate, was garlanded with shoes by a villager while campaigning door-to-door for civic elections.
Their subsequent post on the incident had reported that the villager had garlanded the candidate to bring the acute water problem in the region to his notice.
Another post from the incident included Sharma's statement from the incident, where he said "he did not mind the act", calling it a reaction out of anger, not enmity.
We also ran a relevant keyword search and found an NDTV report dated 8 January 2018 that had covered the same incident.
The same clip had previously gone viral during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and even during the 2022 Gujarat Assembly elections. Both times, it was fact-checked by The Quint’s WebQoof team and was found with false claims.
Conclusion: The video of a BJP candidate being garlanded with shoes is from Madhya Pradesh’s Dhamnod (2018) and has no connection to the ongoing Bihar Assembly elections.
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