BharatGather: A Culturally-Informed Benchmark Dataset for Misinformation and Fake News Detection in Indian Public Events

Abstract

Large-scale public events, such as religious festivals, political rallies, and cultural gatherings, are increasingly vulnerable to the rapid dissemination of misinformation, posing substantial risks to public safety and social cohesion. While automated fake news detection has seen significant methodological progress, existing benchmarks frequently fail to capture the socio-cultural nuances and event-specific dynamics characteristic of the Indian context. This paper introduces BharatGather, a curated, multi-source dataset specifically engineered for binary misinformation classification within the ecosystem of Indian mass gatherings. The corpus comprises 14,646 records constructed through a hybrid pipeline involving systematic web scraping of prominent fact-checking platforms, multimedia transcript extraction, and Large Language Model (LLM)-mediated synthetic augmentation to ensure narrative diversity. By providing a resource tailored to the unique complexities of event-aware misinformation in India, this work facilitates the development of culturally informed detection systems and establishes a rigorous benchmark for evaluating their performance in high-stakes public environments.