Fact Check: Army jawan beats vendor in West Bengal for selling Bangladeshi flags? No, find the facts here
A video claiming to show an Indian Army jawan assaulting a flag seller in West Bengal for selling Bangladeshi flags is going viral on social media.
By M Ramesh Naik
Claim:The video shows an Indian Army jawan thrashing a flag seller in West Bengal for selling Bangladeshi flags.
Fact:The claim is false. The video is from Bangladesh, not West Bengal, and has no connection to the Indian Army.
Hyderabad: A video showing a man in uniform hitting a street vendor selling flags is circulating widely on social media. Several users are claiming the video shows an Indian Army jawan in West Bengal assaulting a vendor supposedly selling Bangladeshi flags.
One Facebook user shared the video with a caption in Telugu, which loosely translates to, āI feel peace watching such videos. Our jawan gave a grand welcome to a man selling Bangladeshi flags in Bengal. Super!ā (Archive)
Fact Check
NewsMeter found that the claim is false. The video was filmed in Bangladesh, not West Bengal, and the man in uniform is not from the Indian Army.
We extracted keyframes from the video and conducted a reverse image search. This led us to a YouTube video published on June 11 by News1 TV titled āArmy finds flag seller and donates Tk 1 lakh! See you in October, says Hamza.ā (Translated from Bangla)
A similar video was uploaded by Dhaka Post on June 12, titled āArmy gifts flag seller who was lathicharged with 10 lakh taka.ā
To verify the incident, we conducted further keyword searches that led us to a news report by Ajkerpatrika, dated June 12, 2025, which provides the full context.
According to the report, the incident occurred during a Bangladesh vs Singapore football match at the National Stadium in Dhaka. In the chaos outside the stadium, Bangladesh Army personnel were trying to control the crowd using batons (lathicharge) and a flag seller was also struck.
Lieutenant Colonel Afzalur Rahman Chowdhury of the Gulistan Army Camp later confirmed that the incident was unintended. The Army apologised to the vendor and compensated him with Tk 1 lakh.
The viral video is being falsely linked to the Indian Army and West Bengal. In reality, it showed an incident in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where a flag seller was hit by local Army personnel during crowd control.
Therefore, the claim that an Indian Army jawan beat a flag seller in West Bengal for selling a Bangladeshi flag is false.
