Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
As West Bengal prepares to vote in the first phase of Assembly polls on April 23, a video of policemen surrounding a group of injured men lying on a road is going viral on social media. The video showed the injured men singing the national anthem while the police filmed them.
Sharing the video, an X user wrote, “See the brutality of Mamata Banerjee and sections of the West Bengal Police. A group of men, reportedly opposed to her and on their way to a BJP rally, were beaten severely and pressured to sing the Bangladeshi national anthem. Despite the assault, the men chose to sing Jana Gana Mana, holding their ground even while injured. What followed made it worse, as they were mocked with remarks that ‘Azadi from TMC is not going to happen’! This is the state of affairs in West Bengal.”
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India Today Fact Check found that this is a 2020 video from Delhi. It went viral during the Delhi riots.
OUR PROBE
Reverse-searching keyframes from the video led us to the same clip posted by X users in February 2020. These posts claimed the scene was from Delhi. One of the X users even wrote that the video was from Maujpur in Delhi.
We also found screengrabs from the video in May 2023 reports in The Times of India and The Indian Express. According to the reports, the Delhi High Court had ordered that the statement of Mohd Wasim, one of the five injured people in the video, be recorded before a magistrate. Allegedly, these men were beaten up by the Delhi Police and forced to sing the national anthem during the Delhi riots that took place in late February in 2020.
According to a Scroll report from February 2025, five Muslim men were beaten by policemen and forced to sing the national anthem as clashes erupted over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Delhi. One of the men, Faizan, died.
However, the youngest in the group, Wasim, has been fighting for justice in the court.
Notably, on April 21, West Bengal Police debunked the viral claim on X, clarifying that a 2020 video from Delhi was being falsely circulated as a recent incident from the ongoing West Bengal state elections.
Thus, we concluded that the viral claim is false.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
