A video showing a group of people assaulting women with sticks is being widely shared on social media, with a communal claim.
The claim: The video is being shared to claim that it shows people from the Muslim community assaulting Hindu women in West Bengal's South 24 Parganas.
Text shared with the video reads, "Look at the plight of Hindu women in West Bengal. In South 24 Parganas, members of the jihadi community are beating Hindu women with sticks and weapons (sic)."
The Quint also received a query to verify this claim on its WhatsApp chatbot.
(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)
Is it true?: No, the claim is misleading.
News reports and West Bengal police have said that the assault took place over land dispute, and do not mention any religious angle to the incident.
How did we find out the truth?: A reverse image search on one frame of the viral video led us to an X (formerly Twitter) post shared by India Today, which carried the same video and was shared on 31 December 2025.
Its caption said that the video showed "a woman and her family members being beaten with sticks and wooden poles during a dispute over alleged land encroachment."
We looked for their report about the incident, and found that it happened after the woman in the video, along with others, protested against what they alleged was the "forced excavation of soil from private land."
After the woman and her family reached the spot to stop them from clearing the land, the dispute escalated to violence, it added.
A report by The Indian Express identified one of the aggrieved as Shabana Laskar Khatun, noting that after her neighbours forcefully tried to take soil from her family's land, she filed a written complaint with Basanti Police Station.
The complaint allegedly said that the attack for a premeditated one, and that the neighbours were trying to seize that piece of land.
Speaking to ETV Bharat, the town's sub-divisional police officer (SDPO) Ramkumar Mandal said that complaints had already been filed and that they were investigating the matter. "Our initial guess is that this incident took place over a family dispute," he said.
West Bengal police clarify: West Bengal Police's official X account addressed the viral misinformation, saying that the incident was of a "land dispute in the Basanti PS area... where members of two families clashed with each other, resulting in injuries to two women."
They added that while the principal accused had been arrested, the police were conducted raids to apprehend the other accused persons.
Conclusion: A video of women being assaulted over land dispute in the Basanti area of West Bengal's South 24 Parganas is being shared with a false communal angle of Muslims attacking Hindu women.
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