The Rajya Sabha passed the Waqf Amendment Bill with 128 members voting in favour and 95 against it, following a nearly 12-hour-long discussion on 04 April 2025. The Bill had already been passed by the Lok Sabha earlier. In this context, a video (here, here and here) has gone viral on social media claiming to show Samajwadi Party members protesting against the Waqf Amendment Bill, with police seen attempting to arrest and assault them. Let’s fact-check this claim.
Claim: The viral video shows Samajwadi Party workers being lathi-charged by police while protesting against the Waqf Amendment Bill in April 2025.
Fact: The video is actually from 07 December 2020, during a protest in Lucknow after Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav was detained while on his way to Kannauj to protest against the farm laws. The person seen being beaten by police is Mohammad Yameen Khan of the SP. While there have been protests by the Samajwadi Party against the Waqf Amendment Bill, this particular video is unrelated to those protests, hence the claim is Misleading.
To verify the claim, we performed a reverse image search on Google, which led us to the same video uploaded on YouTube by the channel NYOOOZ UP-Uttarakhand on 10 December 2020. The Hindi caption of the video translates to: “Even after being beaten up by the police, SP worker Yameen Khan continued shouting slogans of ‘Akhilesh Yadav Zindabad.’” In the video description, the individual being beaten by the police is identified as Samajwadi Party worker Yameen Khan. This clearly indicates that the video is not recent and is unrelated to the Waqf Amendment Bill.
We also found a similar video, showing the same visuals as the viral clip, shared on X by Uttar Pradesh journalist Pankaj Jha on 07 December 2020. He mentioned that the UP Police had lathi-charged Samajwadi Party workers outside the party office in Lucknow. He further mentioned that the incident took place when Akhilesh Yadav was preparing to launch a tractor march from Kannauj. This provides additional context about the incident and confirms the location.
Further investigation using relevant keywords led us to several news reports (here, here and here) that also mentioned the viral video. According to these reports, on 07 December 2020, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav was detained in Lucknow while en route to Kannauj to protest against the farm laws. In response, SP workers staged protests across the state. During one such protest near the Samajwadi Party office in Lucknow, Mohammad Yameen Khan was brutally lathi-charged by the police. The viral video shows him being beaten, including on the head, though he later recovered.
Additionally, the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, seeking major changes in the management of Muslim-donated properties, was passed in the Lok Sabha on the night of 02 April 2025, with 288 MPs voting in favour and 232 against. On 04 April 2025, the Rajya Sabha approved the bill with 128 votes in favour and 95 against, following a nearly 12-hour-long discussion. While some street protests by Samajwadi Party workers against the bill were reported, the viral video in question is unrelated to these demonstrations.
To sum up, a 2020 video of a Samajwadi Party protest against farm laws is being shared as a recent protest against the Waqf Amendment Bill.
