On 26 September 2025, violence erupted in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, allegedly (here, here, and here) during a protest against police action on people who carried ‘I love Muhammad’ posters during an Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi procession in Kanpur on 4 September 2025. Soon after that, security forces were deployed to control the situation. As per the reports, a video of an incident where police chased away people who took part in an ‘I love Muhammad’ procession in Mau District was shared on social media. On 27 September 2025, the Uttar Pradesh Police arrested eight persons in relation to the violent clash in Bareilly, including a local Islamic cleric named Tauqeer Raza Khan, who called for a demonstration.
In this context, a photo (here, here, here, and here) of a person with wound bandages on his posterior is doing the rounds on social media, linking it to these riots. Social media users are sharing this photo with a description in Hindi that translates to ‘Those who rioted in the Bareilly market…Denting and painting Credit: UP Police, implying that the person in the photo was beaten by the UP Police during this unrest. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The photo shows a Muslim person assaulted by police in Bareilly during the recent violent clashes/riots.
Fact: The photo is from a 2023 incident in Uttarkashi, where a Dalit youth was reportedly beaten after entering a temple. It has no connection to the September 2025 Bareilly violence. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
When we ran the viral photo through Google Lens, we found an older post of the same photograph on Facebook, dated January 2023. This post contained news clippings from 12 January 2023 describing how a Dalit youth from Salra village of Mori Block in Uttarkashi district was beaten with burning wood overnight for entering a temple. The photo matches exactly with the one in the viral post.
Further, to learn more about this incident, we performed a keyword search online and found news reports (here, here, here, and here) and social media posts (here and here) about this incident from January 2023.
As per these reports, the victim Ayush, a Scheduled caste youth from the Benaul village, was allegedly beaten with a burning log through the night on 9 January 2023 for entering a temple in Sarla Village. This makes it clear that the viral photo has no connection to the September 2025 Bareilly violence.
To sum up, an old photo from Uttarkashi in 2023 is being falsely attributed to recent violence in Bareilly.
