Old, Unrelated Video Shared As Violence During Bengal Panchayat Polls

An old video of two groups of people engaging in a stick fight with each other has resurfaced on social media with a false claim that it shows recent visuals of violence which happened in West Bengal during the run up to the Panchayat polls.

BOOM found that the video does not show a recent clash between political parties from West Bengal; the footage is at least six years old and can be found online since 2017.

The ruling-Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal secured a thumping victory in the state's rural body elections after witnessing a month-long violence during the run up to the polls. According to several news reports the violence witnessed as many as 15 deaths apart from complaints related to unusual vote patterns and ballot-box tampering during the election. While the opposition parties alleged that it was the ruling party workers who were behind the clashes, the TMC refuted the claims and blamed the opposition.

Amid this, the video is being shared with the caption, "MAHABHARAT LITE IN WEST BENGAL".

Click here to view the post's archive.

West Bengal BJP leader and the party's national secretary Anupam Hazra also tweeted the video with a similar caption.

Click here to view the tweet.

Fact Check

BOOM had debunked the same video in March this year when it went viral with another false claim that the clip shows a glimpse of North Indian migrants being attacked in Tamil Nadu.

We broke the video into multiple keyframes and ran a reverse image search on several keyframes to get details about the video. One such reverse image search on Russian search engine Yandex led us to a YouTube link from October 27, 2017.

The video was uploaded with a sarcastic caption saying, "India Vs Pakistan serious fight......"

BOOM however was not able to independently verify the details regarding the video.