Indian Army says a viral clip of Chinese troops in Arunachal is really a Bengaluru drill

The Indian Army on Sunday 25 October rejected a video circulating on social media that purported to show Chinese soldiers searching Indian Army personnel inside Arunachal Pradesh. In a fact check, the army said the footage actually came from a counter-terrorism mock drill held in Bengaluru, in the southern state of Karnataka, in May 2026, according to an IANS report carried by Udaya News and a Dynamite News report.

The army attributed the clip to social media accounts based in Pakistan. According to the army statement, those accounts claimed not only that Chinese troops were frisking Indian soldiers in the state, but also that Indian forces had to seek permission from Chinese forces to move through Arunachal Pradesh. The army said neither claim was true and that the video had nothing to do with Chinese soldiers.

The army warned the public not to confuse a security exercise with a real military confrontation, and urged social media users to check the original source, location and context of any footage before sharing it. It summed up what it called the disinformation pattern as an old counter-terrorism drill, combined with a false identification of Chinese troops and an invented Arunachal Pradesh setting, producing a misleading story about border security, Dynamite News and IANS reported.

An independent check by India Today reached the same conclusion. Its fact-check team traced the clip to a longer, higher-quality version uploaded to a YouTube channel on 15 May. The footage shows a green vehicle stopped in front of a roadside shop while men in military uniform frisk people standing with their hands raised. India Today said a Pakistani user on X had shared the video with a caption presenting it as proof of Chinese control inside the state.

India Today said shop signs visible in the clip were written in Kannada, the main language of Karnataka. One sign carried the name and phone number of a tools shop owner, who told the outlet that he had filmed the video himself in Devanahalli, on the edge of Bengaluru, in May, and that it showed a mock drill by Indian forces.

The fake clip surfaced at a sensitive moment for the disputed frontier. India Today noted that Shatrujeet Kapur, director general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, said on 22 October that Indian and Chinese personnel had faced off at several locations along the Arunachal Pradesh border in recent days. It added that India's Ministry of External Affairs had said those encounters followed Chinese departures from established patrolling patterns in some border pockets.

The Arunachal clip was not the only post the army challenged. In a separate fact check, it rejected claims by a Pakistan-linked account that soldiers had launched a crackdown on a youth political group on the morning of 23 October, leaving seven young people injured and two dead. The army said the account had used an old image of security personnel handling a hunger strike at Jamia Millia Islamia University in south Delhi on 17 October, an incident in which no one was hurt, according to IANS and Dynamite News.

The army said the two fact checks reflect a wider concern about posts that reuse old footage or misplace locations to build false stories about the military and national security. None of the three reports cited any comment from Chinese officials on the video.