Video from Orissa viral as TMC workers attacking the police in West Bengal

Bengal’s State Assembly election results were announced on 2^nd May, 2012. Since then, there have been reports of clashes between political parties from different parts of the state. Somewhere there are allegations that a group of people have killed the supporters of another party and somewhere there have been incidents of burning the party office. This has caused a stir at the national level. Various pictures, posts and videos of such clashes are being shared on social media. 

Recently, a video was shared on social media claiming that grassroots level TMC workers were beating up police in West Bengal. The video shows a police car parked in the middle of a road and several people smashing car windows with sticks. It is seen that one person from the mob started beating the police and the police wearing khaki started running down the street.

The caption of the post reads, “#PresidentRuleInBengal Policeman came to control the situation & then TMC goons attacks on Police.#tmcgoons #BengalViolence”

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Verifying the video, we found that this claim is baseless and misleading. An old video from Orissa is being shared as an incident showing violence by TMC workers in West Bengal.

Fact Check- 

We started our investigation by running a reverse image on one of the keyframes we extracted from InVid-We verify tool. The results of the reverse image search did not yield any leads.

Next, after carefully observing the video, we found that the language being spoken among the locals is Odia. We ran a keyword search based on our observation and found a news report on the video by Kalinga TV published on 13 January 2021 which stated that a policeman’s car was set on fire by locals.

We found that this news report has a very similar video as the one going viral over social media. According to the report, Bapi Mahalik, a resident of Hatuari village in Bhadrak district, fell into a pond and died while fleeing from the police. The locals then erupted in anger and started protesting by blocking the way. When the police car came there, they rushed and attacked the police van. The protesters set the car on fire. The angry mob torched police vehicle in Alinagar Square under Tihidi police limits of Bhadrak District in Odisha.

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Upon another relevant keyword search on YouTube we found a news report by an Oriya channel “Kanak News”. According to the news report, a young man named Bapi had gone to his sister’s house. The police went there to interrogate him related to some old incidents. The resident of Hatuari village tried to flee after seeing the police. The police followed him. He stumbled into a pond while fleeing and lost his life.

Below you can see a comparison of the screengrab of the viral video and the YouTube video which shows the similarity between both the videos.

Conclusion– Fact Crescendo found the above-mentioned video to be False. The viral video on social media does not show TMC workers attacking Bengal police. The video is from Orissa when an angry mob attacked the police in Bhadrak district. The video dates back to January 2021.