Old video of mob violence falsely linked to recent unrest in Haryana

By: Vivek J
August 7 2023

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(Trigger Warning: This story contains descriptions of distressing visuals, and mentions of assault. Reader discretion is advised.)

Context 

Just days after violence erupted in Haryana last week—leaving six people, including a Muslim cleric and two home guards, dead— a video of a group of people attacking a man on the road in broad daylight is going viral on social media with the claim that the visuals were filmed during the recent unrest in the north Indian state. In the video, while two people beat the a with canes, a third tries to crush him with a rock. 

A post on X (formerly Twitter) claimed the incident occurred in Mewat, where the recent unrest started following a procession by Hindutva outfits on July 31 and soon spread to other parts of Haryana. “If Mewat doesn’t wake you up, then one day you will also see an end like this,” the post, originally written in Hindi, read. Archives of such similar posts can be seen here, here and here. This post alone had garnered over a million views and 15,000 likes at the time of publishing. Several other users have shared the video with hashtags like #Mewat, #MewatTerrorAttack. We even found some social media posts claiming that the video captures a recent incident in Kashmir.

However, these visuals are old and reportedly show an incident that took place in Bangladesh.

In fact

On conducting a reverse image search on the viral video’s keyframes, we came across several social media posts with the same clip. Different posts placed the incident in different places. However, the earliest social media post we came across was from 2017, establishing that the viral video is not from a recent incident. 

We also came across a report by The Wire published on April 15, 2017, headlined, “Fake News: Hatemongers Passed Off Bangladesh Video as Anti-Hindu Violence in Bihar.” The report carried a screenshot of a Facebook post from April 2017. Sharing the video, the Facebook post falsely claimed that Muslims in Bihar attacked a Hindu man. The Wire report cited a now-deleted YouTube video and noted that the video was, in fact, from Comilla, Bangladesh. It reported the video showed two men being attacked after they were accused of killing a political leader.

Taking a cue from this, we looked for reports of the said 2017 incident from Camilla, Bangladesh. One report by Bangla news website BD24, dated April 3, 2017, noted that two people, Abu Sayeed (24) and Muhammed Ali (35), who were accused of killing Union Parishad chairman Monir Hussain Sarkar, were attacked by a mob in Bangladesh. The report also noted that Abu Sayeed died on the way to the hospital and that Muhammed Ali was critically injured and undergoing treatment at a hospital in Dhaka. The report also mentioned that the attack took place in Gouripur Bazar, Titas Upazila, Comilla district, on April 2, 2017.

While looking for more information on the victims, we found a couple of Facebook posts dated July 7, 2017, which carried a screenshot of the viral video. These posts, mostly in Bangla, noted that Hindu right-wing groups were using videos of Abu Sayeed and Muhammed Ali being attacked in Bangladesh by a mob to spread communal hatred in India.

In a report published in June 2019, The Times of India had also debunked a claim shared with the viral video. The report also said that the video is from Bangladesh.

 False narratives shared with the video have been debunked on several occasions since 2017 by independent fact-checkers.

The verdict 

A video that has been circulating online for at least six years is now being used to claim that it shows an incident from the recent communal violence in Haryana. According to multiple reports, this video is from an incident that took place in Bangladesh in 2017. Therefore, we mark the claim false.

(Editor’s Note: We have refrained from adding links to the original video due to the distressing nature of the visuals.)