Fact Check: Old video of a Hindu priest thrashing a woman shared with caste angle

Hyderabad: Social media users have shared a video showing a Hindu priest thrashing a woman near temple premises. The priest is holding the woman by her hair.

(Source:Screengrab from the viral post)

The caption of the video reads: “Bolo Jay Shri Ram... A Harijan woman who tried to enter a Hindu temple was beaten up mercilessly by the head priest for being a woman of lower caste.”

The viral video could be seen on multiple social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

The caption states: “A woman who tried to enter a Hindu Temple was beaten up mercilessly by the head priest for being:

1. A woman.

2. A woman of lower caste.

Poor Hindus get a different kind of Parshad (Grace) from Hindu Temples…”

Fact Check

NewsMeter found the claim to be false as the viral video is being shared with misleading context.

Upon performing a keyword search, we found a media report in Lokmat Times titled ‘Shocking! Priest thrashes women devotee after she demands to open the temple for worship' dated 7th August 2021.

“Shocking incident has come to light in the Darbhanga district of Bihar. A priest grabbed the hair of a woman and thrashed her who had come to the temple for Darshan. The video of the incident is also going viral on social media. After this, the temple administration took action against the priest and said that the matter would be investigated. Also, the concerned priest has been removed from the temple work till interrogation,” the report said

It further explained that the incident took place on the steps of Shyama Mai temple in the Raj area of Darbhanga. It also mentions that no complaint has been lodged by the woman who was being beaten by the priest. The incident took place as the doors of the temple were closed to the public against the backdrop of the corona guidelines and the woman was demanding to open the door and insisted on going inside the temple for worshiping Shyama Mai.

The same report could be seen on multiple media outlets such as Live Hindustan, Navbharat Times, and Amar Ujala.

Not only this, we found an extended version of the viral video on the YouTube channel of Zee Bihar Jharkhand titled 'Temple priest thrashes women in Darbhanga, video goes viral' dated August 8th, 2021. In the extended version of the video, we can see that the priest is trying to stop and beat up the woman in a red saree.

Nowhere in any of the media reports, have we spotted any kind of caste angle as claimed by the misleading social media posts. The incident occurred in August 2021 when the nation was reeling under the second COVID wave.