News of Dalit woman getting beaten in Karnataka is shared with fake image and information

On February 8, 2023, a Twitter user named Gurbaksh Singh Chahal, who was sentenced to a year in prison in the U.S. for assaulting his girlfriend, shared a tweet with the caption, “When a Dalit woman approached the yard of a man from a higher caste to get her cow, the man hit her with his shoes and verbally harassed her. In the Koppal area of Karnataka, the animal had strayed into the landowner’s yard.”

Besides, another caste-centric propaganda portal, “The Dalit Voice,” also shared the same image. In their tweet, they blamed the upper caste.

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Fact Check

We started our research by doing a simple reverse image search and found that this image is not from any recent incident. As per TOI, the image is from Chandrapur, Maharashtra, where seven members of the Dalit community were thrashed on suspicion of performing black magic.

This news is old. However, this was not a caste crime because the victim and accused belong to the same caste group. The woman in the picture, Shantabai Kamble (65), is beaten by a mob consisting of Datta Kamble, Balaji Kamble, Keshav Kamble, Suraj Kamble, and a few others, so this rules out any casteism angle in this case.

Hence, the image used even as a representative image is misleading in this case. Further, we used keywords such as “Dalit woman beaten in Koppal, Karnataka,” where we found several media reports but with different images or representations. According to The Hindu, Amaresh Kumbar abused and beat a Dalit woman after her cow trespassed his property.

Moreover, Amaresh Kumbar comes from the Kumbara caste, which falls under OBC 2A in Karnataka.

Further, we found Koppal District Police on Twitter, quoted The Dalit Voice’s tweet stating that the information presented is false, and moreover requested the user to delete it.

Thus, after extensive research, our team concludes that the news shared by Gurbaksh Singh Chahal and The Dalit Voice is misleading.

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