Video of man beaten up for attacking a woman wrongly shared with communal angle

By: Soham Shah
June 13 2023

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(Trigger Warning: Mentions of sexual and physical assault. Reader discretion is advised.)

Context
A video is circulating on Twitter with the claim that a Muslim man tried to slit the throat of a Hindu woman who refused to marry him. A tweet sharing the video claimed that the man had taken the woman to a park to kill her. The embedded text in the video also claims that the woman was caught in the “love trap” of a “jihadi” who tried to slit her throat. The video also shows the woman’s cheek and neck bleeding while a mob is seen beating up the alleged perpetrator. 

The video has been shared with communal undertones and claims that it shows an incident of ‘love Jihad’. According to a conspiracy theory floated by right-wing groups, under 'love jihad,' Muslim men systematically woo, seduce and marry Hindu women with the purpose of converting them to Islam. 

In Fact
Using the InVID tool, we ran a reverse image search on the keyframes of the video. This led us to a video report shared on the YouTube channel of the local news outlet ‘NYOOOZ Bihar-Jharkhand’. The video report was shared on September 16, 2019. The report mentions that the attacker is one Arvind Kumar. According to the report, both the attacker and the survivor are from Latehar district in Jharkhand, and the incident took place in the state capital of Ranchi on September 15, 2019.

The viral clip was also shared by another local news outlet ‘Taaza Khabar Jharkhand’ on its YouTube channel on September 16, 2019. In the video report, Vinod Ram, station in charge of Pithoria Police Station (Ranchi), tells the press that the attacker and the survivor knew each other from before. The description of the video also states that the police identified the accused as Arvind Kumar, a resident of Latehar district. According to the report, Kumar attacked the woman after she refused to marry him. The woman screamed and raised an alarm, because of which the local resident nearby were able to intervene and save her. In the video, the locals can be seen beating up the accused and rescuing the woman. The police said that the attacker had been arrested, and the survivor had been sent for medical treatment.

News reports by Prabhat Bharat and ETV Bharat (Jharkhand) published on September 16, 2019, and September 16, 2019, respectively, mentioned similar details of the incident. Both news reports published the photo of the accused and identified him as Arvind Kumar. 

Further, for a report published on September 21, 2019, The Quint's WebQoof team reached out to the senior superintendent of police of Ranchi (Rural), who clarified that the incident captured in the viral video was not related to ‘love jihad’. A press release he provided identified the accused as Arvind Kumar and also made it clear both that the survivor and the accused were from the same community and that there was no ‘love jihad’ or communal angle to the incident. The press release also mentioned that Kumar allegedly molested the woman and attacked her when she resisted.

Existing fact-checks by multiple organizations also show that the video is recurringly shared on social media with the false and communal claim of a Muslim man assaulting a Hindu woman.

The Verdict
According to the police, both the attacked and the survivor are from the same community. We mark the claim false as there was no ‘love jihad’ or communal angle in the incident.