Dalit man tortured in Jhansi? Old video resurfaces; police says victim, assailants from same community

A 55-second-long clip, purportedly showing a Dalit labourer with his hands tied and his head being shaved against his will as a crowd laughs at his plight, is viral on social media. In the second half of the clip, the man is seen speaking to the media, narrating the ordeal he was subjected to. He says his head was forcibly shaved as an act of humiliation because he refused a job, and he was then paraded in that state.

X user Navratn Lal Yadav (@NavrtnYadav) shared the clip on June 29 with a caption in Hindi that translates to: “Now if a Yadav, Lodhi, or Dalit refuses to work as a labourer, their head is shaved, they are hung upside down and made to drink water, paraded through the entire village—this is the Taliban-like punishment of the BJP government. There is no definition for what happened in Jhansi; under the protection of the government of the dominant people, their courage is emboldened. PDA will change the government in 2027”. So far, this post has received over 163,000 views and has been retweeted nearly 2,000 times. (Archive)

Several other users shared the same clip, claiming that the victim belongs to the Dalit community and the perpetrators are from a dominant caste. Below are a few instances.

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Fact Check

We noticed that the Jhansi police clarified, under some of the recent posts carrying the viral clip, that the video is eight months old and that both parties are from the same community.

 

To know more about the incident, we broke down the viral video into several keyframes and ran a reverse image search on a few of them. This led us to a report by Aaj Tak from October 25, 2024, which carried a screengrab from the viral clip. The headline of the article said: ‘A young man was punished for not preparing fodder for the buffalo, his head was shaved and he was hung from a tree with his hands and legs tied’.

The report mentioned that the victim, 45-year-old Baba Kabutra, was tortured by four men, who have been referred to as bullies, from the Takori village in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh. According to the report, one of the assailants was pressuring the victim to move from the Padri village to Takori to prepare fodder and clean dung of his cattle. When the victim declined the job, four men—Vijay, Nakul, Shatrughan and Kallu—dragged him from his workplace, shoved him into a car and took him to Takori village where they shaved his head, paraded him through the village, beat him up with his hands and feet tied and hung him upside down from a tree.

A case had been registered at the Sipri Bazar police station after the video of the victim’s head being shaven went viral on social media. The report, however, made no mention of the victim or the assailant’s castes.

We then came across a report by Hindustan Times, also from October 25, 2024. Quoting the station officer of Sipri Bazar police station, the report mentioned that both the accused and the victim belonged to the same caste.

A video statement by superintendent of police, Gyanendra Kumar Singh, shared on Jhansi Police’s official X account on October 26, 2024 made it clear that the victim was “Baba Kabutra”, a resident of Padri village, and the assailants, three of whom had been arrested, were also from the Kabutra community.

To sum up, the viral clip is from October 2024, and is not an instance of caste-based violence. The victim and the assailants are from the same community.

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