Fact Check: Video of two women beaten up by mob is NOT related to communal discrimination
By Vamsi Krishna Pothuru Published on 12 Aug 2020 9:40 AM GMT
Hyderabad: Twitter user@ChMSarwar, who is the current Governor of Punjab, Pakistan, shared a video of two women brutally assaulted by a mob. The video was accompanied with a claim in Urdu which translates to, "Running an RSS mission @narendramodiIndia has become a country of extremists in the guise of secularism. Other minorities, including Indian Muslims and Christians, are being tortured on the streets. This humiliation of Muslim women is a slap in the face to the world. #RSSTerrorists."The post received over 3.5k likes and 3.5k retweets.
The same video with an identical claim was shared on Facebook.
Archived claims can be found here and here.
Fact check:
The claim that Women were beaten because of their community is FALSE.
This was an incident related to child kidnapping from Bihar, which happened in 2019. They were beaten up by a mob over suspicion of child kidnapping and not because they are Muslims.
Taking cue from a comment made by a Twitter user on the post, we searched on YouTube and found the same video. The video posted by PrabhatVarta on July 26, 2019, reported it as an incident related to child kidnapping issue.
Upon relevant keyword search on Google, NewsMeter also came across a news article published by Dainik Bhaskar one year ago. It reported that women in the video are Sangeetha Devi and Baby Devi, who are accused of stealing kids. The crowd dragged the two women on the road and thrashed them. The incident happened in Rohtas district of Bihar. Dawath police station's SHO stated that they filed an FIR on 500 people who were involved in the incident.
Child kidnapping rumors on social media resulted in many mob lynching incidents last year. This video is related to one such event but resurfaced with a communal narrative several times later.
Video of two women assaulted by a mob has no communal angle to it, and it was an incident related to child kidnapping issue that happened in Bihar last year.
So the claim made in the post is FALSE.
