A Lynching Video Filmed in Another Country
During India's 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, an old lynching video from abroad was passed off as a fresh local atrocity and spread on YouTube and WhatsApp. An official state inquiry later concluded the misattributed clip helped inflame communal violence that left at least 60 people dead.
In late August and September 2013, the districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh were convulsed by clashes between Hindu and Muslim communities. At least 60 people were killed and more than 60,000, mostly Muslims, were displaced, The Wire reported a decade later, making it one of the worst episodes of communal violence in India in years.
The immediate spark was a local dispute in the village of Kawal that left three young men dead in late August. But tension was amplified, investigators and news accounts found, by a video that spread rapidly across the region — footage presented as proof of a fresh atrocity that was, in fact, nothing of the kind.
Footage from a different crime, a different country
The clip circulating on phones and computers purported to show the murder of two local men, but was “actually footage of unrelated violence in Pakistan from several years earlier,” the BBC reported at the time. When a state Special Investigation Team examined the video years later, it concluded the clip was old and had been shot in Afghanistan or Pakistan, according to Scroll.in. Either way, the graphic footage had no connection to the deaths in Kawal, yet it was passed off as evidence of them.
The recycling of old or foreign footage to manufacture a sense of immediate threat is a pattern that misinformation researchers have since documented repeatedly in India and elsewhere.
Spread by YouTube, then beyond reach on WhatsApp
The footage did not stay on any single platform. The state's Justice Vishnu Sahai Commission, which investigated the riots, described the material as a clip “showing some brutal killing of an unknown individual” passed off as the lynching of the two Hindu youths, and noted its circulation “on WhatsApp and YouTube,” DailyO reported, citing the commission's findings. The commission said that by the time the clip was deleted, “a lot of tension had already been created between Hindus and Muslims.”
The episode is often cited as an early example of encrypted, peer-to-peer messaging carrying inflammatory content past the reach of takedown orders that apply to open platforms — a dynamic that would recur in later waves of rumor-driven violence in the country.
A criminal case over a clip
Police treated the video not as an incidental detail but as a possible driver of the violence. A local Bharatiya Janata Party legislator, Sangeet Som, was accused of sharing the fake video and was arrested and booked under the National Security Act in September 2013, and the Sahai Commission named him among those it held responsible for circulating the clip. Som denied wrongdoing.
Years later the case against him collapsed. A state Special Investigation Team gave Som a clean chit, finding no evidence he had uploaded the video, and in 2021 a special court accepted the SIT's closure report clearing him, Scroll.in reported. Other riot-related cases against BJP figures were later among those the state authorities sought to withdraw.
More than a decade on, the Muzaffarnagar riots remain a reference point in debates over how quickly falsified footage can move through social media and messaging apps — and how little recourse the state has once a lie has been forwarded thousands of times.