When asked if the video was shot in his shop, Kumar got antsy and denied it vehemently. “Two people can go to any shop, talk nonsense, shoot a video and make it viral. It is not a difficult thing to do.”

So was that video shot at your shop? “No,” he asserted.

The conversation might have looped from election issues to Shaheen Bagh, but Kumar was now fully aware that we’re investigating the BJP video. He turned defensive, claiming he has no affiliation to any political party. He began cursing and grabbed my notebook, striking off the bit where I had written “BJP karyakarta” under his name. He then ripped out the pages with my notes.

As I smoked a cigarette that I’d bought from his own store, Kumar even shot a video of me, saying, “Look, this man is smoking at my shop without my permission.”

He then said: “Wherever that video might have been shot, you should know one thing. That boy in it did not know anything. He was a kid. He couldn’t tell his elbow from his ass. And by the way, I have nothing to do with the BJP, the AAP or the Congress.” The “boy” refers to the person in the “sting” video who says Shaheen Bagh’s women are being paid to protest.

Till the last minute of our meeting, Kumar remained incensed and refused to concede that the video was shot at his shop. Finally, four days later, he told me over the phone: “The video was indeed shot at my shop,” he said, “but it was another person who shot it covertly from outside. And what was said in it is unreliable.”

It is hard to believe Ashwani’s caveat — that the video was shot from outside the shop by an outsider. In the video, the accuser, who is standing outside and across the desk, looks inside while addressing the comments of the person behind the camera.

Additionally, at 1:24 in the video, the camera zooms out and it becomes clear that the person shooting the video is inside the shop. A person standing outside would have to stretch his hands all the way to the inside to shoot that frame. Such gymnastics would hardly go unnoticed, and would be far from being “covert”, which Kumar claimed it was. When I posed this to him, he said his father might not have noticed it because he is an “elder”.

‘There is no proof, it is common sense’

About 50 metres away from Ashwani Kumar’s shop, the neighbourhood was decorated with BJP flags. A particularly large party flag was hoisted on the terrace of one of the houses.

This is the home of Bhanwar Singh Rana, a local BJP worker in Pul Prahladpur. A stout man with a ready smile, Rana believes that women in Shaheen Bagh are being paid to protest. He cannot prove it, he claimed, but it is “common sense”. “If the protest is honest, why are they making women sit on the road?”