A photograph, allegedly of a group of girls from Kerala wearing lungis to protest a ban on jeans imposed by in colleges, has been doing the rounds on social media since Sunday and has since gone viral.
Here is the photo:
It had over 1000 shares on Facebook with personalities like celebrity hairstylist Sapna Bhavnani among those sharing it. It is also doing the rounds on Twitter.
Many complimented the girls:
And some engaged in a war of words:
But wait…
Turns out the same image did the rounds when a Mahesh Babu film released in 2015.
And some folks on Twitter are claiming that this is from even before that film came out and is of some Kerala students at a dance competition.
So here are the facts as they stand:
- There’s no state-wide ban on jeans in Kerala colleges.
- The picture isn’t of a unique protest in a Kerala college (though it isn’t a bad idea to protest against a jeans ban if there ever was one)
- Even the 2015 report doing the rounds of an institute run by a Muslim organisation imposing such a ban was found to be false