New Delhi: A tweet began circulating on X on 13 June. It accused Sherbir Panag, son of Lieutenant General Harcharanjit Singh Panag (Retd), of illegally dumping rubbish outside an Australian woman’s house in Melbourne. The post also used a photograph of Lt Gen HS Panag to lend weight to the claim.
The allegation was false. Sherbir does not live in Melbourne and is a crisis lawyer based in India. For the lawyer, the episode reflects a larger pattern aimed at portraying India and Indians in a poor light.
“It’s irrelevant whether they target me or someone else. What is important is the malicious and sinister manner in which fake news and propaganda are peddled online, to incite racism and online hate against Indians,” Sherbir said.
The tweet showed a man wearing a black jacket with a box of garbage. It claimed that an Australian woman caught Sherbir dumping boxes of rubbish in a Melbourne neighbourhood and had chased him down. The post got over 1.26 lakh views and over 500 retweets.
A fact-check by the Digital Forensics Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) found the claim to be false.
“As part of our investigation, we conducted a reverse image search using keyframes extracted from the viral video. This led us to an original post shared by Australian news platform The Noticer on X,” the DFRAC said in a tweet.
Fact Check: Melbourne Dumping Video Falsely Linked to Lt Gen (Retd) H.S. Panag's Son
A video circulating on social media claims that an Australian woman caught Sherbir Panag, the son of Lt Gen (Retd) Harcharanjit Singh Panag, illegally dumping boxes of rubbish in
1/7 pic.twitter.com/IGKBTzskaE
— DFRAC (@DFRAC_org) June 13, 2026
The original news referred to an incident involving an Indian man allegedly dumping rubbish in a Melbourne neighbourhood. However, it did not identify the individual as Sherbir.
The matter didn’t end with the false claim. What followed was a wave of racist commentary. “They are cheap trashy people. They don’t pay for trash removal. So, they dump shit in their neighbours’ yards,” read a comment. Another went further.
“India is a s*** hole full of rubbish and s*** and now, that’s what they want to do in Australia,” the comment said.
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Who is running these accounts?
Journalist and fact-checker Mohammed Zubair says that the online racist attacks against Indians have increased in the past couple of years.
“There are now many accounts from Pakistan that are pretending to be from, say, Australia or England, maybe pretending to be White, or anonymous accounts, and they are digging up videos—older ones or unrelated videos from other places—in which people are identified as Asians,” Zubair said.
It’s not just accounts from Pakistan driving the hatred.
“There are definitely a lot of anonymous accounts from Pakistan deliberately doing this. And there are also genuine accounts from other countries, for example, Australia, New Zealand, or the US—the White nationalist and far-Right groups—who are doing it regularly,” he added.
This is not the first time in recent months that Indians have faced such attacks. Two weeks ago, an Indian couple faced racist abuse and were asked to “Go back to India” by a stranger in the US.
“Why don’t you stay in India? Why do you have to come to America?” the man asked the couple in the video. It triggered a widespread reaction on social media.
The man didn’t stop there. “We don’t want you here. You gotta go home,” he said.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)