Video of modified tractor from Turkey falsely linked to farmer protests in India

What's the claim?

During the ongoing farmers' protests in India, a video of a modified tractor equipped with a metal frame as a front guard is circulating widely on social media with the claim that farmers are bringing this tractor to Delhi to be able to breach police barricades. Users on X (formerly Twitter) captioned the video, "Does this looks like a preparation for kisan aandolan …? It is a brazen preparedness for War. And, Who is paying for all this expensive breastwork /fortification/parapet ..??? It is obvious that Khalistanis are in action again not farmers…!." 

The post was viewed more than 1,00,000 times and reshared over 1,000 times at the time of writing this story. Archived versions of such posts can be found here and here. This video was also shared by a senior journalist in India, Pallavi Ghosh, who later deleted the post. An archived version of the post can be found here.

Screenshot of claims made online. (Source: X/Modified by Logically Facts)

What we found

Logically Facts found the widely shared video is not from India, but Turkey.

We conducted a reverse image search on the keyframes of the video and found that this video was shared on YouTube on January 30, 2024. We noticed a TikTok watermark on the video: cengizler_tarim_55.

We found the user's Instagram and TikTok accounts and found that they shared the same video on both platforms on January 30, 2024. 

On Instagram, the caption of the video post suggested that the user filmed it and that they own the clip. The caption written in Turkish translates to English as, "Original video and owned by me."

Logically Facts contacted cengizler_tarim_55 on Instagram, who confirmed that he had taken the video and that it was captured in Samsun, a city in northern Turkey.

Upon closer examination of this video shared by the user, we noticed a yellow board with the text: "Celik." Our search revealed that Celik is a battery manufacturing company located in Turkey.

Image showing the store name. (Source: X/Celik Battery)

This evidence indicates us that an unrelated video is being linked to the ongoing farmers' protest.

The verdict

The video does not originate from the current farmers' protests 2.0 in India; it is from Turkey. The person who shot the video confirmed the same to us. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.