Unrelated video from 2019 shared as footage of violence by Muslims against Hindus in West Bengal.

By: Vivek J
April 17 2023

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Context

A video has been making the rounds on social media platforms such as Twitter and Koo, claiming that Muslims in West Bengal assaulted Hindus. This video is also being shared with the hashtag #presidentruleinwestbengal to imply the breakdown of law and order in the state and demand the President’s rules. On the day of Ram Navami, a Hindu festival that was celebrated by many in April 2023, several instances of violence and clashes between people of two communities were reported from various states, including West Bengal. This video started circulating around the same time that violence over Ram Navami events was reported. In the video, a group of men can be seen beating up two people. 

In Fact

Upon conducting a reverse image search of the keyframes of this video, we came across several posts with the same video. We found that this video was also shared in May 2020 with a similar narrative claiming that Hindus were being attacked in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. Thus, it is clear that the incident is old and not from 2023.

By further looking for similar posts using the keyframes, we came across a Facebook post in Bangla, a widely spoken language in West Bengal and Bangladesh, from April 2019. By translating the text from Bangla to English, we learned the user had written about alleged auto thieves being beaten up. By searching Facebook using the Bangla text from that post, we found many more such posts with this same video. All of them were from March or April 2019. These posts implied that this incident actually happened in Bangladesh. However, we did not come across any credible news reports to confirm the location where this incident took place. 

Some of these posts even questioned whether beating up alleged auto thieves was okay. The oldest post containing this video was from March 24, 2019. It was shared by a Bangladeshi Facebook user named ‘Chader Hashi Chandpur.’ These old posts imply that this issue was not communal. We cannot independently confirm this with no verified reports on the incident. However, it is clear that this video is not from the recent communal clashes that occurred in West Bengal in April 2023. 

The Verdict

A video of two people being beaten up by a mob has been shared as footage of communal violence against Hindus in West Bengal. However, this is an old video from 2019 and most likely from Bangladesh. The incident in the video is unrelated to the recent communal clashes in West Bengal and is shared with false claims.