Fact Check: Old newspaper clipping of Amar Ujala reporting Dalit atrocity shared as recent

The PDA (Pichde, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) slogan, meaning "Backward classes, Dalits, and Minorities," was used by Samajwadi Party (SP) supremo Akhilesh Yadav in the lead-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh. The slogan was a strategic move to create a unified voter base among marginalised communities. It yielded results, with SP winning 37 out of 80 seats in the state.

Against this backdrop, a newspaper clipping reporting vandalism of Ambedkar's statue and atrocities on Dalits by Muslims has been circulating on social media, hinting that the incident is recent. An X user taking a dig at the slogan, shared the newspaper clipping with the caption “PDA.” (Archive)

Another X user shared (archive) the clipping captioned, “This is the real truth of PDA!” Several X users shared the newspaper clipping on June 13, 2024, suggesting that the incident is recent. Click here and here to see the archived version of the posts.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is misleading, as the incident occurred in 2019. The newspaper clipping shared with the post is from an Amar Ujala report from that time.

On conducting a reverse image search, we found the newspaper clipping posted by Facebook users in April 2019. (Click here and here to see the posts.)

Taking cues from the clipping, we ran a keyword search and found the incident reported by Amar Ujala on April 21, 2019. The digital version has a slightly different headline but the report is identical to the viral print version.

According to the report, the incident occurred in Mahuawa village of Gauri Bazar in Deoria, Uttar Pradesh. A young man from another community entered a home in a Scheduled Caste neighbourhood and harassed a teenage girl. When the girl raised an alarm, her family woke up, and the man fled after threatening them. The next night, the man entered the girl’s house again. When the family chased him away, he returned with a group of armed youths who assaulted the girl and her family. They also beat the neighbours who came to help and vandalised an Ambedkar statue before leaving.

A Jagran report of April 21, 2019, which reported the incident with the same details named the accused as Rehmat Ali.

Hence, we conclude that the viral news clipping reporting the incident was published by Amar Ujala in 2019. The claim that the incident is recent is misleading.