BJP Leader, News Channels Share Video From Pakistan With a False Communal Spin
The video showed the husband of a woman trying to abduct her from a court where she had filed a complaint.
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(Editor's Note: The story was first published on 24 December 2021 and is being republished from The Quint's archives as the viral video was brought up again by former AAP leader Deepak Bali.)
A video showing a woman being dragged away by some men has been shared by BJP's Manjinder Singh Sirsa and several news channels as an attack on the Hindu minority community in Pakistan by the majority community.
However, we found that the video was from Umerkot in Pakistan where a woman's husband tried to abduct her from outside the court, where she had appeared for the dissolution of their marriage citing domestic violence. Both the man and woman belong to the Hindu community.
CLAIM
Sharing the video, Sirsa wrote, "Stunned to silence! Look how a Hindu woman is abducted in daylight, out-side session courts Umarkot, Sindh-Pakistan. She is screaming for help but they aren’t afraid of any police or action and they dragged her from hair and put her in car (sic)".
Subsequently, news channels like Times Now, Republic Bharat, ANI News and Hindustan Times carried Sirsa's tweets.
Republic TV interviewed Sirsa in which he claimed that the woman in the video was a 19-year-old girl from the Meghwar community who was kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert.
Former Oxford University Students Union head, Rashmi Samant, and BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay also shared the video claiming that it was an attack against the minority community.
Archives of more such posts can be found here, here, and here.
WHAT WE FOUND
Using the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension, we extracted some keyframes from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search on some of them.
The reverse search led us to a report by news outlet The Pakistan Daily which mentioned that a 40-year-old married woman identified as Tejhan Bheel was dragged on the road outside a court in Umerkot by her husband and others.
As per the report, she had approached the court for dissolution of her marriage and was returning home when the incident happened.
(Source: The Pakistan Daily/ Screenshot)
We found another report in Pakistan daily Dawn, which carried similar details and mentioned that she was a resident of Vehro Sharif and couldn't tolerate domestic violence due to which she wanted to end the marriage.
The woman reportedly said that they tried to abduct her but ran away when she raised an alarm.
We then came across a post by the Pakistani journalist, who reported on the incident in Umerkot for The Pakistan Daily, AB Arisar.
He reiterated the details given in the news reports and dismissed the claims made by Indian news channels.
"It's not a case of Hindu or Muslim, she was Hindu and had approached the court against her hindu husband Herchand Bheel She was reportedly abducted by her inlaws, they were also Hindus and FIR is a proof of it (sic)," he wrote.
It must be noted that this is not a commentary on the incidents on attack on minorities in Pakistan. This is only to provide facts of this incident and to show how an unrelated matter was linked to the issue of attack on minorities and shared multiple times by leaders and media.
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