A video of a mob beating up two police officials in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly is doing the rounds on social media websites. Along with the video, a claim is being made that Muslim youth are thrashing policemen because they issued a challan against them.
The video is being widely shared on different social media platforms, most notably on Facebook and Whatsapp, with a claim that Muslim residents in Bareilly clashed with police officials after the latter had issued a challan against them.
Claim
A text with the video says: “Bareilly Civil Lines News: A group of Muslims thrashed a policeman who was issuing them a challan. This is a challenge to law and order. This video shows what can happen in India in the future, who will be ruling the country and what will be the future of the citizens. Bitter truth is that India has more threats from within than external ones.”
The video and the claim have spread like wildfire on various social media platforms.
Along with the video, a text of the incident is also in circulation on Whatsapp.
The video is also being shared on Twitter.
Fact check
When the video and the text message doing the rounds were reverse-searched, the video was found to be from March 2021 and it is from Rajasthan, and not Uttar Pradesh. According to a report published in ETV Bharat, there is no communal angle into the incident as alleged in the text that is being bandied around on social media platforms.
The ETV Bharat report says the video is about the personnel of Haryana Police who had gone to Jurhara village in Rajasthan in connection with the probe about a couple and a local person was hit by a police vehicle. An altercation ensued soon after the incident after which the local people surrounded the policemen and beat them up.
Fake claims of Muslim men beating up police in Bareilly doing the round since 2018
This is not the first time that the video along with the spurious claims made in the text have surfaced online. Sometime around May this year, the same video had gone viral on the internet, after which Bareilly Police had to issue a clarification saying that the claims made in the text are unfounded and the incident did not take place under its jurisdiction.
कतिपय Twitter के माध्यम से एक वीडियो बरेली सिविल लाईन्स का बताकर प्रसारित किया जा रहा है। जिसका बरेली पुलिस खण्डन करती है। #UPPolice @Uppolice @adgzonebareilly @igrangebareilly @CMOfficeUP @UPGovt pic.twitter.com/e9Ya46zW3p
— Bareilly Police (@bareillypolice) May 25, 2021
Earlier in January this year, social media websites were rife with posts making similar claims that a mob of Muslim men attacked police officials in Bareilly for issuing challan. Although, another video was shared with the claim. The video that was circulated then was from 2018 and it was from Ghaziabad, not Bareilly.
In 2018, a group of people had thrashed a policeman after he tried to settle a brawl outside a State Bank of India branch in Ghaziabad’s Loni Border. Even at the time of the incident, fake claims of Muslim men beating up cops for issuing challan had gone viral.
