A set of old and unrelated videos, one showing a group of lawyers protesting, and another a man attempting to attack Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, are being falsely linked on social media to the recently passed Waqf (Amendment) Act.
BOOM found that the videos have no link to passing of the Waqf (Amendment) Act. According to our fact-check, one of the videos is from an unrelated lawyers' protest from February 2025, while the other video is from an attempted assault on Kumar in March 2022.
The Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, was passed in the lower and upper house of the parliament after intense debates, and received presidential assent on April 5. Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) an NDA ally of the BJP, provided crucial support for the bill to be passed. The posts are being shared in this backdrop.
A Hindi caption shared with the video of lawyers protesting translates to English as, "Lawyers are protesting in huge numbers against the Waqf Board Bill!! Lawyers slogan, dictatorship will not work on the power of MP. Take back the black law."
The video of attempted assault on Kumar was shared with a Hindi caption, which translates to English as, "A youth from Bihar slapped Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for supporting the Waqf Bill."
Click here and here to view the above posts.
Fact-Check
Video of lawyers protesting from February 2025
BOOM viewed the video showing lawyers protesting, and found a logo of a channel named HNP News. Taking cue from this, we did a keyword search, and found a Hindi YouTube local news channel with the same name and logo.
We further refined our keyword search by including Hindi keywords, which led us to a video uploaded by the channel on a lawyers' protest in Delhi against The Advocate (Amendment) Bill on February 21, 2025.
Looking through the video, we found the viral visuals from the 1.37 mark onward.
A frame-by-frame comparison confirmed that the viral video has indeed been cropped from HNP's YouTube video.
BOOM found several news articles (ETV Bharat and Dainik Bhaskar) on the advocates' protest in Delhi from February 2025, which confirm that the visuals have no link to the passing of the Waqf (Amendment) Act.
Video Of Nitish Kumar Slapped Is From 2022
In the other video, a young man can be seen approaching Kumar from behind before being quickly apprehended by security personnel.
BOOM conducted a keyword search and found the same video posted by ANI on March 27, 2022, with the caption: "A youth tried to attack CM Nitish Kumar during an event in Bakhtiyarpur, Bihar. The police later took the accused into custody."
According to a report published by Prabhat Khabar on March 28, 2022, Kumar had pardoned the man, who was found to be mentally ill, and had instructed authorities to provide him with medical assistance.
