Fact Check: Alleged Assault on BJP Leader in Haryana

On social media, there is a film of a fight between a group of people with the claim that the public beat up a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in Sirsa, Haryana. 

A lot of people on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) shared the video with the same claim. You can read old copies of these kinds of posts here, here, and here.

The claim is false, though. A fight breaks out between two Indian National Congress (INC) groups in the video.

How did we find the truth?

By searching backwards through the video’s keyframes, we found a YouTube video (archive here) that was posted by the Hindi newspaper Punjab Kesari on May 6, 2024. The story says that the video that went viral is from Sirsa, Haryana, where members of two different Congress party groups got into a fight.

A number of Haryana-based news websites also posted the video, which is now going viral. This video was posted on May 5 by the Ambala Breaking News Facebook page. It claims to show a fight between followers of Congress leaders Selja Kumari and former state Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Sirsa’s Samain village, where elections are set for May 25. The video was also posted on Ambala Mirror (archive here), which is another website.

We talked to Manjit Malhotra, a reporter for the news site, who told us the same things and added, “There have been conflicts between these two groups before, but not to this level.” The event took place in Sirsa’s Samain village. We were also able to figure out that the video was taken in Samain Village, Sirsa, Haryana. We also talked to Purushottam Dutt, who lives in the area and confirmed that the fight took place in front of his shop.

The verdict

Someone sent around a video of a fight between two groups in the Haryana Congress, showing a BJP leader getting beat up in Sirsa. The event took place in Sirsa’s Samain village and has nothing to do with the BJP. So, we’ve marked this claim as not true.