The image has been doctored -- the original photo shows police protesting an unrelated issue in 2019
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on October 15, 2020 at 08:33
- Updated on October 16, 2020 at 10:46
- 3 min read
- By AFP India
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The image was published on Facebook here on October 9, 2020.
The policeman in the photo appears to be holding a Hindi placard that reads in English: “Baton charging the innocents, we won’t be able to do it so”.
The post’s Hindi caption translates as: “The police do not baton charge, but the government makes them do so.”
Baton charging is a police practice used locally to confront crowds or protests. A recent example can be seen here in an October 2020 report by India Today about police baton charging protesters in the Indian state of West Bengal.
The image was also shared alongside the same claim on Facebook here, here, here and here and on Twitter here, here, here and here.
However, the claim is false.
A reverse image search on Google found that the image has been doctored. The original photo was published here on the Indian English-language news website Scroll.in on November 5, 2019, and shows the policeman holding a placard that reads: “WE WANT JUSTICE”.
The photo is attributed to the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency, and is captioned: “Police personnel in Delhi Protest”.
The other Hindi-language placards seen in the photo translate to English as: “Who will listen, whom shall we speak to” and “Today is police, tomorrow who?”
The Scroll reports that a police officer in the Indian capital of Delhi “joined thousands of police personnel to protest against an assault on his colleagues by lawyers outside the Delhi Police Headquarters on the weekend.
“The tensions had been building since November 2 after a dispute over a wrongly parked vehicle outside Tis Hazari Court Complex in Old Delhi snowballed into a clash that left 10 policemen and several lawyers injured, and 17 vehicles vandalised.”
Below is a screenshot comparison of the image in the misleading Facebook post (L) and the photo published by Scroll.in (R):
The PTI photo was also published in this report by the Indian English-language magazine India Today on November 5, 2019.
The protest was also reported by other local media, including English-language newspaper Economic Times here, and English-language newspaper The Hindu here.
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