Video of a Patna High Court judge reprimanding police in November 2022 is falsely linked to Influencer Sharmistha Panoli’s bail case
A viral video (here, here, and here) on social media allegedly shows a Judge reprimanding Kolkata police for arresting social media influencer Sharmishta Panoli. She was arrested by the Kolkata police on 30 May 2025 for allegedly making communal remarks. The Calcutta High Court (a bench of Justice Raja Basu Chowdhury) granted her an Interim bail on 5 June 2025. The viral video is being shared in this context. We will fact-check the claim made in the viral video through this article.
Claim: Video of the Calcutta High Court Judge, Raja Basu Chowdhury, who granted interim bail for Influencer Sharmistha Panoli, reprimanding Kolkata police for their actions.
Post: The viral video is from a Patna High Court hearing held on 30 November 2022, unrelated to the Sharmistha Panoli case. The judge in the video is Justice Rajiv Ranjan Prasad, who had reprimanded the Bihar Police for the wrongful arrest of a female doctor in a medical negligence case. Hence, the claim made in the viral post is False.
To verify the viral claim, we reverse-searched keyframes from the viral video and found an Instagram post from December 2022 containing the same visuals. It carried hashtags like #Patna and #highcourt, pointing to a much older incident unrelated to the Sharmistha Panoli case from 2025. Apart from this, we also found similar social media posts of the same video from 2022, which you can find here, here, and here
We then found the full video of this court proceeding on the official YouTube channel of the Patna High Court. Dated 30 November 2022, the hearing featured Justice Rajiv Ranjan Prasad criticising the Bihar Police over the wrongful arrest of a female doctor in Jamui. The exact statement seen in the viral clip appears at around the 4:47:00 mark in this video.
In contrast, influencer Sharmistha Panoli was granted interim bail by a bench of Justice Raja Basu Choudhury of the Calcutta High Court on 5 June 2025. We did not find any news reports to validate the claim that Justice Raja Basu Choudhury reprimanded police for the arrest of Sharmistha while granting her bail.
To sum up, a 2022 video of a Patna High Court judge scolding Bihar Police has been falsely linked to the 2025 case of Sharmistha Panoli.