2008 Video From Goa Linked With Post-Poll Violence in West Bengal

The video is from 2008 and the incident happened in Goa.

Fact Check: 2008 Video From Goa Linked With Post-Poll Violence in West Bengal.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A video showing an altercation between police personnel and a group of men in saffron clothing is being widely shared on social media with the claim that these men were a group of foreigners in West Bengal who were beaten up by the cops for endorsing Hindu religion.

This claim comes on the back multiple misleading videos being shared on the internet to portray post-poll violence in West Bengal.

However, The Quint found that the abovementioned video is from 2008 and the incident happened in Goa when a group of Russians chanting religious slogans clashed with the police after they were asked to stop after causing a traffic snarl.

CLAIM

The aforementioned video is being shared on Twitter and Facebook with a claim in Hindi, which translates to: "Indian Hindus are habitual of suffering injustice. However, Hindus in other countries are extremists. This video is from West Bengal where a Hindu foreigner was preaching the teachings of the Bhagavad Geeta."

An archived version of the tweet can be accessed here.

Archived version of the claim can be viewed here, here and here.

The video was also viral on Facebook in 2018 and 2019 with claims stating that it shows ISKCON devotees being beaten up by cops in West Bengal. Archived version of these claims can be viewed here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

On carefully observing and breaking the video into keyframes using the InVid Google Chrome extension, we found that the vehicle seen in the video has Goa Police written on it.

This raised our suspicion and we searched Google with relevant keywords and found a YouTube video, which claimed that the incident was from Goa.

Archived version of the video can be accessed here.

We also found a report by Goa Herald, which carried an image showing a devotee and a cop from the same video. The link to the report only carried a headline that mentioned that the incident was from Mapusa Taxi stand in Goa where Russian members of the Hare Ram, Hare Krishna sect were confronted by the Goa Police.

To find out more about the incident we called up the Mapusa Police station in Goa. The cops told us that the video was of a 2008 incident.

Tushar G Lotlikar, a police inspector at Mapusa police station, said that all these individuals were arrested on charges of assaulting police personnel.

Clearly, an unrelated video from Goa has been revived on social media to claim that it shows West Bengal Police' crackdown on followers of the ISKCON Temple.

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