Claim: A video shows police prevented Muslims from praying on Eid in Indian occupied Kashmir.
Fact: The video shows Indian police officers violently enforcing COVID-19 lockdown by hitting people with sticks in 2020.
On 31 March 2025, a post on Facebook showed a video of police officials threatening and hitting people with canes. The post claimed this was an instance of police violence against Muslims in Indian-occupied Kashmir to prevent them from offering Eid prayers. As Eid recently passed from 31 March–2 April 2025, we assume the post refers to this year’s Eid-ul-fitr prayers. The caption of the post read as follows in Urdu:
مقبوضہ کشمیر میں بھارت کا ریاستی جبر”
“مودی سرکار نے کشمیریوں کو نماز عید کی ادا ئیگی سے روک دیا
According to Google Translate, it reads as follows in English:
“India’s state repression in Occupied Kashmir
Modi government stopped Kashmiris from offering Eid prayers”
This post comes in the context of heightened security and political tensions in Indian-occupied Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status in 2019.
Fact or Fiction?
A reverse-image search of keyframes of the video was conducted to verify if it indeed showed Indian police brutality against Muslims, preventing them from praying on Eid. The earliest instance of the video was found on the online platform 9gag. The post is dated 29 March 2020 and its caption reads: “Indian police caning people who did not follow coronavirus lock down”.
Two posts on X similarly associated the video with the pandemic, one dated 2 April and the other 3 April 2020, with captions in Arabic. When translated, the former post’s caption reads: “The number of deaths in India 🇮🇳 from Corona is 3, multiplied by 857,241.” The latter’s caption reads: “Indians suffered more from the police than from the virus”.
To see if the Indian police had enforced such strict measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a Google search for “Indian police corona virus”. This search yielded news articles from Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Radio France Internationale dated March 2020 that showcased the Indian police’s methods of maintaining social distancing among the population, which often involved masked officers beating lockdown offenders with long sticks. The search also led us to a number of videos of such instances, which can be seen on CNN, Arab News, ABC News (Australia), Voice of America, Global News, Hindustan Times, and TRT World Now. The scenes from these videos are very similar to the video in the claim, in that police officers wearing protective masks are seen caning people, most of whom are not wearing masks. From 0:52–1:05 in the video in the claim, police officers are seen intimidating and beating a person with a mask in their hands, and this person eventually puts the mask on at the end of the video.
Moreover, we came across a relevant fact-check by another International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) signatory India Today. It verified a video that surfaced in 2022 and claimed to show Indian army personnel catching Pakistani-Muslim spies in the city of Ajmer. The personnel are seen wearing masks or have their faces covered with a cloth, and are beating people with long sticks. However, India Today found that the video was actually from April 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown in India. Police had taken action against people who had violated the curfew and gone to a local mosque for Friday prayers.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, noted that videos of police violence from the COVID-19 lockdown have been misleadingly labelled and shared online as instances of anti-Muslim violence in the past as well.
While we could not ascertain the exact location of the video in the claim, we can conclude that it likely shows a scene from the time of the COVID-19 lockdown in India in March 2020. During this time, masked police officers often resorted to beating lockdown offenders with long sticks, as seen in the video. Hence, Soch Fact Check rates this claim as false.
Virality
On Facebook, the video has garnered 664 K views. It was shared here, here, here, and here.
On Instagram, it was shared here and here.
Conclusion: The video in the claim actually shows police officers caning people to enforce COVID-19 lockdown practices in India. The video is likely from March 2020, when the Indian police did resort to violent tactics to ensure people upheld social distancing and wore masks in public regularly. The video is not from this year’s Eid-ul-fitr prayers in India.
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Background image in cover photo: CNN
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