Fact Check: No BJP leaders ‘beaten up’ in TN, viral video of scuffle between BJP workers from 2023

Original video of the incident from last yr shows that during a rally in Odisha, a fight broke out after a BJP leader was stopped from approaching party state president's jeep.

Screengrabs from the post making the false claim.

Hyderabad: With the Lok Sabha polls fast approaching, misinformation about elections has been on the rise. A video showing a scuffle breaking out during a BJP roadshow has been doing the rounds on social media. The captions accompanying the posts claim that BJP leaders were beaten up while on the campaign trail in Tamil Nadu.

“This has just happened in Tamil Nadu. The public is taking down the BJP leaders from their luxurious chariots and wiping out their hands…,” wrote an X user who shared the video. (Archive)

(Source: X/@SorabhInc)

Several X users shared the video claiming the same. Click here, here and here to view the archived versions.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is misleading as the video shows a scuffle among BJP leaders during a roadshow in Odisha in 2023.

While skimming through the comments on the post, we found a user saying that the video is from Odisha. (Archive)

With this cue, we ran a relevant keyword search, which led to a report by Odisha Bytes (Archive) from 9 October, 2023, titled, ‘Odisha: Two BJP Leaders Scuffle During State President’s Rally In Balangir’. It carried a cover image with a visual from the viral video.

According to the report, the scuffle broke out during BJP state president Manmohan Samals’ rally in Odisha’s Balangir district. While the rally was passing through RTO Chhak, BJP’s district leaders Anant Das and his associate Balaram Sing Yadav went to present a bouquet to Samal, but were stopped by another local leader Gopalji Panigrahi, which led to the scuffle.

We also found an identical cover image in another report on Odisha Reporter (Archive) from 9 October, 2023. It said Gopalji stopped Anant Das’s attempts to climb into the jeep and present flowers to Samal, which led to a scuffle between the two and their supporters.

We also found the incident was reported by Odisha TV on 9 October, 2023, titled ‘BJP leaders scuffle during state unit president’s Bolangir rally’. The viral clip in this report appears at the 1 minute and 23 second mark.

Hence, we conclude that the viral clip showing a scuffle at a BJP rally occurred in Odisha in 2023. The claim that the video is from Tamil Nadu is misleading.

This story was originally published by News Meter as part of the Shakti Collective. Apart from the headline, excerpt and introduction, this story has not been edited by ThePrint.