This video has circulated in reports since June 2018 about police assaulting a Hindu group in Aligarh, India

This article is more than one year old.
Published on September 24, 2019 at 09:15
2 min read
By AFP India

A video has been viewed thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter which claim it shows Indian police officers assaulting protesters at an anti-government demonstration in a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The claim is false; the video has circulated in media reports since June 2018 about police assaulting members of a Hindu group in a different city.

The 30-second video was published here on Facebook on September 16, 2019. It was viewed more than 17,000 times before it was removed.

The post's Hindi-language caption translates to English as: “The unemployed youth, who were protesting outside Chief Minister Kamal Nath's residence in Bhopal, received their gifts. All the unemployed youth got their joining letters on the spot this morning."

Kamal Nath is a member of the Indian National Congress party and chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Bhopal is the state’s capital city.

The post was published within days of statewide anti-government protests in Madya Pradesh, as reported here by India Today on September 11, 2019.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:

Screenshot of misleading Facebook post

The video was also shared in Facebook posts here, here, here and here, as well as here and here on Twitter, alongside a similar claim.

The claim is false; the video shows police in Aligarh, a city about 600 kilometres (370 miles) north of Bhopal. The footage shows police attacking a Hindu group who were protesting outside the office of the local police chief in June 2018.

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the video found similar footage of the same protest. It was published by Indian news agency ANI here on Twitter on June 12, 2018. The footage is embedded below.

#WATCH: Police baton charge on members of Hindu Jagran Manch who were protesting outside the office of Aligarh Senior Superintent of Police (SSP), demanding the arrest of accused who had attacked one of their members. pic.twitter.com/vJkqoWxUkT
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 12, 2018

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading posts (L) and the video tweeted by ANI (R) with similar elements highlighted in red:

Image comparing screenshots

ANI tweeted this statement by the local police chief about the incident.

Protesters alleged that section 307 was removed from the case. We conveyed to them that an investigation will be conducted over it but they continued to protest so we had to lathi-charge them (members of Hindu Jagran Manch) & arrested 7 people: Ashutosh Dwivedi, SP Crime #Aligarh pic.twitter.com/Y8W5GPoNob
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 12, 2018

The incident was also reported by several Indian media, for example in reports by English-language daily newspapers Indian Express and The Times of India.

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