On Thursday, the Internet was flooded with videos of the Srinagar Airport terminal filled with passengers waiting to catch a flight from Srinagar. Amidst, the ghastly murders of Hindus at the hands of Islamic terrorists throughout the week, the rumours of Hindu families fleeing from the valley were doing rounds. And the visuals of a crowded Srinagar Airport was being shared on social media claiming it to be exodus of Hindus from Jammu and Kashmir. However, the Srinagar Airport has refuted the claims, and said that the airport sees such crown on any regular day.
A video of high passenger traffic at the Srinagar terminal was shared by several social media users, including journalists and political parties. They were quick to call it the exodus of Hindus from Jammu and Kashmir after the increase in instances of tragic deaths of Hindus.
Congress backed INC TV’s handle on Twitter shared the video with a caption, “The view is of the crowd at the Srinagar airport. There are reports of mass exodus coming from there. BJP government is at the centre and also the central government in Jammu and Kashmir. This is the truth of #KashmirFiles.”
Mainstream Media Houses including ABP News and TV9 also reported the news of the crowd at Srinagar airport. While ABP News claimed that the people leaving Kashmir were migrant workers and Government officers working in the state, TV9 Uttar Pradesh Twitter handle said that Hindu-Pandit families from Kashmir are being forced to leave the union territory.
Later, it was for popular handles on Twitter to share the video with similar claims. The widely circulated video caused much havoc and furore among the netizens who were shocked to believe the news of yet another exodus of Hindus from Kashmir.
However, the Srinagar Airport Authority dismissed the reports on social media and termed them as ‘sensational rumour mongering’. Responding to a tweet making the claim that was deleted later, the authority said, “We strongly rebut this sensational rumour-mongering. We handle between 16 thousand to 18 thousand passengers every day. Today also the number of passengers is average. There is no heavy rush of minority community as rumoured by this tweet. Please do not spread rumours like this.”
The Srinagar Airport authority has called the video and claims of an exodus of Hindus ‘rumours’. With escalated violence of Islamic terrorism in Kashmir, the claims of 1990s-like genocide of Kashmiri Hindus have been quashed as fake news by the authorities.