No, this video shows a Hindu woman being beaten by her husband over an alleged affair
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on July 9, 2019 at 10:40
- 3 min read
- By AFP India
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
The video was published here in a Facebook posts on June 1, 2019, and has been viewed over 26,000 times since.
A caption alongside the video in English says: “Muslim women is beaten publicly in India by Hindutva (BJP +RSS).”
Hindutva refers to the pro-Hindu politics allegedly propagated by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
In the 51-second video, a woman is seen with her hands tied by rope to a tree, being repeatedly beaten by a man. The couple is encircled by a crowd of spectators.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:
The same video has been shared elsewhere on Facebook here, here and here, alongside a different claim - that the woman is being beaten for “carrying meat”.
The caption on these Facebook posts reads: “Modi's Hindu India crimes against a Muslim women carrying meat, this is the worst kind of human rights violation in the world, but whole world media is sleeping fast on these Indian human violations!”
“Modi” refers to India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Several people in India have been killed or assaulted on suspicion of carrying beef or transporting cows for slaughter in the last five years, as explained in this AFP report.
But both of the claims are false; the video previously circulated in media reports in 2018 about a woman in northern India being flogged by her husband for allegedly having an affair, after a decision by the village council.
A Google search found the same footage in this video report on the official YouTube channel for Indian news site NYOOOZ TV.
“In a shocking incident, a village panchayat in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr gave a cruel order to punish a woman who allegedly eloped with a man. In a viral video, the woman was tied to a tree and flogged in public by her husband,” reads the description of the video shown below and published on March 22, 2019.
A panchayat is a local council common in rural parts of India, as explained in this AFP article.
Below is a screenshot of the video report:
According to this video report, the incident took place in the Bulandshahr district of the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on march 10, 2018.
Bulandshahr Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Dhan Prakash Tyagi told AFP by phone on July 4, 2019, the “woman seen in the video is not Muslim. We cannot reveal her identity but she is Hindu and belongs to the Lodhi Rajput community. The case is resolved and both husband and wife are living together now in their village".
Indian news channel NDTV published this video report of the incident on its site on March 23, 2018, which contains the following comments from a police official.
“We took action as soon as the video came to our notice. We called the woman and registered her complaint under the relevant section of the Indian Penal Code. The complaint has been filed against six people, including former chief of the village council who convened the village council’s meeting and her husband who flogged her,” said Bulandshahr’s then Superintendent of Police (SP), Pravin Ranjan Singh, in the video report.
“We have also registered a complaint against 20-22 other unknown people in the case and arrested three people, including the husband, village council chief and his son,” he added.
Below is an image comparing screenshots of the video published in the misleading Facebook post (L), NYOOZ TV report published on YouTube (M) and NDTV report (R):
The incident was also reported on the websites of the two English-language dailies - Hindustan Times and The Hindu - here and here respectively.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
