Claim: A video is being circulated on Twitter and Facebook, allegedly depicting two Muslim men beating an elderly Hindu woman and forcefully taking a young girl away.
Fact: The video was actually taken in Kalu Khan Ki Dhani village in Rajasthan, India on 11 September 2017.
Verdict: False
A video showing two men beating an elderly woman and forcefully taking a young girl away in a vehicle is being circulated on Twitter and Facebook with captions that claim the incident took place in Pakistan.
An account with 65.4k followers tweeted the video with the caption, “This video is horrifying what’s happening in Pakistan today. These Muslims beat the hell out of this young Hindu girl & her mother & was forcefully taken away. Please I beg of everyone opposing the #CAA please re-think, in 1951 there were 12.9% Hindus in Pakistan & now only 1.6%.”
The video was retweeted by 6.6k accounts and it has also crossed platforms to Facebook, where it is being shared in defense of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) – a controversial bill passed by the BJP government through which India will grant citizenship to persecuted minorities, except Muslims, from neighbouring countries.
Author Shefali Vaidya, who has 456.6K followers, quote-tweeted the video with the caption “Skin crawling. And privileged Indian elite like @BDUTT @FarOutAkhtar and @Ram_Guha oppose #CAA coz they want Hindu women from Pakistan to continue to suffer in silence because they are Hindu, poor and lack a voice.”
However, the video in question was taken on 11 September 2017 in Kalu Khan Ki Dhani village in Rajasthan, India, after a minor girl’s father married her off to a man named Shaukat. However, the girl’s mother refused to let her daughter go with the man since the girl was not old enough to be legally married at the time. This video has been shared with misleading captions multiple times over the past few years in Pakistan and India. It was first fact-checked in 2018 by SM Hoax Slayer who found that the men involved have been arrested by Rajasthan Police. FIR No 197/13-9-17 u/s 363, 354, 341, 323/34 was registered against them. The video resurfaced with another misleading caption in December 2019 and was fact-checked by WebQoof and Alt News.
Summary: The video is not from Pakistan, it was recorded in India in September 2017 and has been re-shared numerous times since then with misleading captions.