Fact Check: UP police lathi-charge protesters against Waqf Amendment Bill? No, video is from Gorakhpur in 2019

Hyderabad: A video showing police officers using batons on a crowd in a busy market is going viral on social media. The footage captures a chaotic scene with several individuals running or reacting to the police action, while some shops, a yellow canopy and a white building with a blue shutter and a red banner are visible in the background.

The video is being circulated with the claim that it shows the Uttar Pradesh (UP) police doing a lathi charge on protesters opposing the Waqf Amendment Bill.

A Facebook user shared the video with a caption stating, “In Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath gives special treatment to those who say no to the Waqf Board Bill,” (Translated from Telugu) (Archive)

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is misleading. The incident took place in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 2019, during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Using a reverse image search of the video’s keyframes, we found the same footage in an X post, shared on December 31, 2019. The post read, “This video is from Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. UP Police using brutal force against unarmed Anti-CAA Protesters. #CAA_NRC_Protest #IndiaDoesNotSupportCAA #IndiaAgainstCAA (sic)”

Further investigation led us to a YouTube video by Live Hindustan, uploaded on December 20, 2019, with the title, ‘Gorakhpur: Two injured in stone pelting, lathi charge during a protest against CAA.’ The video contains identical visuals, including the white building with the blue shutter and red banner, which is visible a minute into the news report.

According to the video’s description, the incident occurred in Gorakhpur’s Nakhas Chowk area after Friday prayers, where stone-pelting by protesters led to a police lathi-charge, injuring two people.

ETV Bharat also reported on the incident on December 20, 2019.

The report confirmed that the protest took place in Gorakhpur during anti-CAA demonstrations, and the police resorted to a lathi charge following stone-pelting by the crowd.

To verify the location in the video, we used the shop signs and the street layout as clues for the location.

The place we found on Google Maps matched the visuals in the video, confirming the location as Nakhas Chowk in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Among the landmarks seen in the video is a shop named ‘Maa Vaishno Stationers’ which can also be seen in the Google images.

The Waqf Amendment Bill was introduced in 2024 by the BJP-led Union government, with protests against it occurring in early 2025, as reported by the ANI on March 17, 2025.

However, the video predates these events by over four years, as it was recorded on December 20, 2019, during the anti-CAA protests in Gorakhpur.

The incident in the viral clip did not take place during protests against the Waqf Amendment Bill. Therefore, NewsMeter concludes that the viral claim is misleading.