Fact Check: Bangladeshis cut hair of students for wearing Western clothes? No, claim is false
A video claiming to show Bangladeshi Islamists forcibly cutting a student’s hair is going viral on social media.
By - M Ramesh Naik
Claim:The video shows Bangladeshi Islamists cutting the hair of students who wear western clothes and do not keep beards.
Fact:The claim is false. The video shows cultural activists staging a symbolic protest by cutting hair during a programme commemorating legendary singer Farida Parveen.
Hyderabad: A video showing a group of people holding a man down and cutting his hair has been circulating widely on social media.
The clip is being shared with the claim that Muslims in Bangladesh are targeting students who wear Western clothes and do not keep beards. Several posts frame the video as evidence of rising atrocities against Hindus or individuals who do not conform to certain social or religious norms in Bangladesh.
An X user shared the video with the caption, “Bangladeshi Islamists chopped the hair of students who wear western clothes & don’t keep a beard. (sic)” (Archive)
A similar post shared in Hindi claimed, “Atrocities on Hindus are increasing in every field in Bangladesh; fundamentalists committed a barbaric act on school students who wear Indian cultural clothes and do not keep beards.” (Translated from Hindi) (Archive)
Fact Check
NewsMeter found that the claim is false. The viral video does not show Muslim men forcibly cutting the hair of students. Instead, it depicts a symbolic protest staged by cultural activists.
To verify the origin of the video, NewsMeter conducted a reverse image search using keyframes from the clip. This led us to a report published by Prothom Alo English, which provided the context of the visuals.
According to the report, the video was recorded on September 26 during a symbolic protest held in Mymensingh, Bangladesh. The event took place along the Brahmaputra riverbank at Shilpacharya Zainul Udyan and was organised by the cultural organisation Parampara as part of a programme commemorating legendary folk singer Farida Parveen.
During the programme, activists symbolically cut the hair of poet Shamim Ashraf, the president of Parampara. This act was intended as a form of protest against a separate and unrelated incident in which a homeless elderly man, Halim Uddin Akand - popularly known as Halim Fakir - was forcibly shaved by a group of people, a video of which had earlier gone viral.
Shamim Ashraf explained in his opening remarks: “Through this act, we express our protest. Over the past few days, we have witnessed an incident where three people forcibly cut a man’s long hair. During the assault, he repeatedly said, ‘O Allah, I leave everything to you.’ Through this statement, we register our opposition to attacks on shrine culture and the oppression faced by artists and cultural practitioners.”
NewsMeter also found a YouTube video uploaded by MCC News TV showing full coverage of the programme. The video, uploaded on September 28, titled ‘Remembering Lalankanya Farida Parveen, who cut her hair in protest on the banks of the Brahmaputra…’ and clearly establishes the cultural and protest context of the act.
A frame-by-frame comparison further confirms this. The viral X video and the original footage are identical: both show a seated person with long dark hair wearing a dark shirt and orange pants, surrounded by men in light-coloured printed shirts with lanyards, cutting hair with scissors in an outdoor park setting with trees and banners in the background. This establishes that the viral clip is merely a cropped excerpt from the symbolic cultural protest.
The claim that Bangladeshi Islamists are cutting the hair of students for wearing western clothes and not keeping beards is therefore false. The video shows a symbolic protest by cultural activists during a commemorative event for Farida Parveen, staged in response to an unrelated incident of forced shaving.
