Old video of youths being beaten at Garba event in Gujarat falsely shared as recent incident

New Delhi: A video of some youths being beaten up in police presence has been widely shared on social media with users claiming they were tied to a pole and flogged in public by policemen for pelting stones from a mosque on women performing Garba in Gujarat’s Kheda district.

The PTI Fact Check Desk found the claim to be misleading since the video is from an incident dating back to October 2022. Back then, police had detained nine people and tied some of them to a pole and thrashed them publicly for allegedly throwing stones on women performing Garba near a mosque in Gujarat’s Kheda district.

A Facebook user named Jitendra Kumar Upadhyay shared the viral video on October 14 and wrote, "This is a place called Kheda in Gujarat. A group of women performing Garba dance were pelted with stones from the mosque, injuring some women. Reacting to the incident, police gave the miscreants the same treatment as is given in Saudi Arabia according to the Sharia Law." This video has been shared by hundreds of users with the same claim.

To verify the viral claim, the desk reverse searched the keyframes of the video and came across a video report by Dainik Jagran related to this incident, uploaded on YouTube on October 4, 2022. It stated the incident took place in the Udhela village of the Kheda district in Gujarat, where the police detained nine people and beat them publicly for allegedly pelting stones at a Garba venue.

A report published on Webdunia portal at that time quoted the then Deputy Superintendent of Police VR Bajpai as saying that at least seven people, including a Gram Rakshak Dal (JRD) jawan and a policeman, were injured during the stone-pelting. More than 150 people were involved in the stone-pelting, out of which 43 people were identified. Police had arrested 13 people in this case.

According to media reports, the Gujarat High Court had sentenced the policemen who beat up the youths in public to 14 days of detention and a fine. The high court gave this punishment for violating the Supreme Court's DK Basu guidelines.

However, a media report published in January 2024 revealed the policemen had appealed to the Supreme Court against the High Court's decision, after which the Supreme Court stayed the high court's decision.

The investigation done by the PTI Fact Check Desk revealed that the video going viral on social media is not recent but two years old.