Old photos from Yemen are falsely shared as images of a Dalit boy beaten in Rajasthan for touching a drinking water pot.
A collage (here, here, and here) of two photos allegedly featuring a Dalit boy who was beaten for touching a drinking water pot (touching a water tap) in Rajasthan is being shared on social media. In the collage, we can see red bruise marks on the boy’s body. A few (here and here) of these posts also share a news report published by India TV to back this claim. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This collage shows a Dalit boy beaten for touching a water pot in Rajasthan
Fact: As per news reports from India TV and other media outlets, a Dalit man was beaten by a brick kiln owner in Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu district in January 2025. However, the viral collage is unrelated to this. It features photos of a boy who was brutally thrashed by his father in Yemen in 2020. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet. Through this search, we found that India TV did publish a news report (also this) about a Dalit man allegedly beaten up for touching a water pot in Rajasthan. He was not a child, as seen in the viral posts.
As per this report from 21 January 2025, a Dalit tractor driver, Chaman Lal Meghwal, was beaten up by a Brick Kiln owner, Vinod Yadav, for touching a water pot. This incident happened when Chaman Lal went to Vinod’s Brick Kiln to collect bricks. He was later beaten up by Vinod and two others with a belt, who later demanded 1.5 lakh rupees from Chaman Lal’s family to release him. The report said that the case was under investigation, according to the police. It featured a blurred video of the victim showing the bruises on his body.
In addition to this report, we found a few other news reports published on this incident by ‘Live Hindustan’ and ‘Deccan Herald.’ None of these reports contained photos that were seen in the viral posts.
To learn more about the photos in the viral collage, we then performed a reverse image search, leading us to news reports (here and here) from 2020 that contained these photos.
As per these reports published by Yemeni media outlets, these photos show a 14-year-old boy named ‘Shamikh Rashid Al-Qahili.,’ a boy who was tortured by his father in Yemen’s Mahwit, Al Rajm District. The boy’s father, Rashid Muhammad Al Quhaili, tied him up with ropes and tortured him. The police later arrested Rashid for this violent act. An additional keyword search led us to a statement issued on 5 October 2020 by Yemen’s Ministry of Interior, which can be found here.
To sum up, old photos from Yemen are being falsely shared as photos of a Dalit boy beaten in Rajasthan for touching a drinking water pot.