A video allegedly showing an IPS officer named Ashish Tiwari assaulting a woman in Uttar Pradesh is doing the rounds on social media. Social media users are sharing this video criticising the Uttar Pradesh government and PM Modi. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video shows IPS officer Ashish Tiwari of the UP Police assaulting a woman.
Fact: The video actually shows a suspended Punjab police AIG, Ashish Kapoor, slapping a woman in Zirakpur police station, Punjab. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet. Through this search, we found that the person featured in the video is not IPS Ashish Tiwari from the UP police but Ashish Kapoor from the Punjab police.
As per the news reports (here, here, and here), the man seen slapping a woman is Punjab’s suspended AIG, Ashish Kapoor. This video is reportedly from 2018 and went viral in March 2023 when the lawyer of the woman getting slapped in the viral video showed it to a High Court judge as evidence during a court hearing.
Ashish Kapoor slapped the woman seen in the video, Poonam Rajan, in Zirakpur police station, Punjab. As per the news reports, Ashsish was accused of accepting a bribe of Rs. One crore from the woman. He was later booked (here and here) by the Punjab police for ‘assault and abuse.’
The Uttar Pradesh Police also issued a clarification via their official ‘X’ handle. Responding to a user’s query, they said, ‘This video is not from Uttar Pradesh but is related to an incident of 2018 in Police Station Zirakpur, Mohali, Punjab.’
Additionally, we learned (here and here) that the incident, which is being shared along with the viral video of a woman named Shraddha Gupta dying by suicide, did happen in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya. Shraddha named IPS officer Ashish Tiwari and two others in her suicide note. However, we found no news reports of Ashish Tiwari assaulting a woman in relation to this case.
To sum up, a video of a police officer from Punjab assaulting a woman in police custody is falsely shared as visuals of an IPS officer from Uttar Pradesh assaulting a woman.
