This video shows members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party clashing in March 2019

This article is more than one year old.
Published on March 16, 2020 at 04:25
3 min read
By AFP India

A video has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim it shows lawmakers from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a major regional political party in India, fighting during a meeting. The claim is false; the video has circulated since March 2019 about a clash at a meeting for politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The video was shared here on Facebook on March 2, 2020. It has been viewed more than 61,000 times.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:

The post’s Hindi caption translates to English as: “AAP’s meeting was underway when Sanjay Singh started hitting a legislator and his party colleague with a shoe, then the legislator retaliated and thrashed Singh badly with his own shoe, watch this shoe fight for free.”

Sanjay Singh is a leading AAP politician and a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament.

The one-minute 57-second video was also shared with a similar claim on Facebook here, here and here; and on Twitter here and here.

The claim is false; the footage has circulated in reports about a fight between two prominent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians in March 2019 in Sant Kabir Nagar, a town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

In the background of the clip, a banner is visible that shows images of India’s BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh’s BJP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The poster’s Hindi text states that the meeting was held in Sant Kabir Nagar and presided over by Ashutosh Tandon, another BJP politician in Uttar Pradesh.

Below is a screenshot with the banner highlighted in the background:

According to multiple reports, the politicians involved in the brawl were BJP members Sharad Tripathi, a former parliamentarian, and Rakesh Baghel, a current legislator in Uttar Pradesh state.

Indian news agency ANI published the same footage of the fight on Twitter on March 6, 2019.

#WATCH Sant Kabir Nagar: BJP MP Sharad Tripathi and BJP MLA Rakesh Singh exchange blows after an argument broke out over placement of names on a foundation stone of a project pic.twitter.com/gP5RM8DgId
— ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) March 6, 2019

The tweet reads: “Sant Kabir Nagar: BJP MP Sharad Tripathi and BJP MLA Rakesh Singh exchange blows after an argument broke out over placement of names on a foundation stone of a project.”

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading post (L) and the ANI video (R):

The video was also published on YouTube by several other media outlets, including the New Delhi-based newspaper Hindustan Times here and Indian news site The Quint here.

The BJP’s chief in Uttar Pradesh at the time, Mahendra Nath Pandey, also summoned both politicians after the incident, ANI reported on March 7, 2019.

“I will try to make them understand about the indiscipline that we witnessed there and give them strict directions on how to behave,” Pandey said according to the ANI report.

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