Old video of people thrashing man in Ambala shared with a communal angle

TW: Sexual harassment

Context

A video of people thrashing a man and stripping him on the road is going viral on social media with a false claim of ‘love jihad’ being attributed to it. The video was shared with the caption, "The Muslim boy pretending to be a Hindu fell in love with a Hindu girl, then when the girls came to know that this is love jihad, the video shows what happened." In the video, people can be seen hitting the man and stripping him naked. The video was shared in different languages — Hindi and Kannada — with similar claims. Love jihad is a conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men entrap Hindu women into relationships and/or marriage with the sole aim of converting them to Islam.

However, the claim is false. The video dates back to 2020 in Ambala city. The accused was a Hindu man and was thrashed for allegedly harassing school girls.

In Fact

Through a reverse image search, we found that the video is from Ambala, Haryana. Pratham Tehelka News YouTube channel posted the video on January 20, 2020. The caption in Hindi states that the man was stripped naked and thrashed by women in a public market.

The viral video was also found on Ambala News Haryana's YouTube channel. At 1:03 minutes, the same viral video can be seen. The video states that the man was identified as Pawan Kumar. 

In the video, a man named Jitendra Kumar is heard saying that the man was stripped naked by the mother of a school girl after she caught him harassing his daughter. A woman, who was also seen stripping the man in the viral video, identifies herself as a school girl’s mother. She says that a man was sexually harassing her daughter and another girl going to school, and that they filed a police complaint. 

Ambala Women Station SHO Sunita Dhaka confimed the FIR in the video.

Logically Facts contacted Dhaka for an updated clarification on the claims about the religion of the accused. She said, “This is false. Both were Hindu, no one was Muslim." The police have not made the FIR copy public as it is a POCSO (protection of children from of sexual offences) case.

On January 21, 2020, Business Standard also reported on this incident. The report also quoted Dhaka identifying the man as Pawan.”

The Verdict

The man in the viral video who was stripped naked in 2020 is not Muslim. The police confirmed that the accused and the victims belong to same community.