Claim: A video shows a Hindu woman being dragged by her hair and beaten in Pakistan.
Fact: The incident occurred in January 2022 when a woman was tortured in Sialkot allegedly over a land dispute. Authorities arrested the culprits at that time. There was no communal angle to the assault.
On 27 August 2022, Indian new channel ZEE HINDUSTAN tweeted a video of a woman being dragged by her hair, kicked, and beaten with sticks and shoes. The Hindi-language caption translated to English reads as follows:
“Atrocities on Hindus are not stopping in Pakistan. A Hindu woman was beaten up with sticks on a minor issue. Victim Hindus are not being heard anywhere.”
The clip gained more than 335,000 views on Twitter alone. The post received over 8,200 retweets and quote tweets, as well as upwards of 7,800 likes.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check investigated the video to ascertain if the claim that it showed an instance of communal violence in Pakistan was true.
We input screenshots taken at different intervals in Yandex Reverse Image Search, which led us to a January 2022 tweet sourced from another tweet by @Emekci_TV, the Turkish-language caption of which referred to “violence against women” and “femicide” in Punjab.
We then used relevant keywords to look up for news stories from Punjab published in January 2022 and came across reports of an elderly woman tortured in Sialkot allegedly over a land dispute. Aaj News, Dawn News, and Geo News reported on the incident and people on Twitter also spoke on the matter.
Authorities, including Azhar Mashwani, a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader and the Focal Person to Punjab Chief Minister on Digital Media at the time, had responded to the tweets mentioned above, saying the perpetrators had been apprehended.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that the incident took place in January 2022 and has no link to communal violence.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the video in multiple posts on Twitter, including in tweets by Jitender Shree, the social media co-incharge for Outer Delhi for the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the youth wing of India’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Fazila Baloch, a London-based social media activist, and Vikas Raina, an activist of India 4 Kashmir (I4K), a “movement to reclaim & rehabilitate India in Kashmir”. The clip was also shared here, here, and here.
On Facebook, the video was also shared here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: A viral video shows a woman being tortured over a land dispute; not because of communal violence.