Viral video: Sitapur teacher assaulted boy for repeatedly leaving ‘Gurukul’ for home, no caste angle, confirm cops

A 2-minute-13-second video is viral on WhatsApp in which a child is brutally beaten up and thrown to the ground by a man. The man can be heard using abusive language while the child pleads with him to stop. Several users have shared this video claiming that the child is being beaten up as the teacher (the man) found out that he was a Dalit studying with Brahmin kids. A few others shared the video saying that this was a scene from an RSS training school.

Alt News received several requests on its WhatsApp helpline to fact-check the claims.

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We also found several users sharing the video with the ‘Dalit’ claim on Facebook.

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On X (formerly Twitter), user Damodharan Prakash (@sathrak1967) shared the video on October 25 with a caption in Tamil that said: “Scene of children being abused in RSS training class”. (Archive)

Fact Check

After breaking down the video into several key frames we ran a reverse image search on some of them. We came across a news update by Public App from October 9 of this year. The title in Hindi can be translated as: “Sitapur: The video of Satish Acharya from Sitapur Sanskrit Vidyalaya Sidhauli went viral in which he was beating up his student severely and using objectionable words”.

Taking a cue from the above, we ran a relevant keyword search in Hindi which led us to news reports from October related to the viral video. According to a report by Aaj Tak from October 9, the incident happened at Gurukul or a Sanskrit school in the Sidhauli region in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh. The teacher, Acharya Satish, allegedly had first threatened the child, identified only by his first name in the report, with expulsion from the school and then started to beat him up for some trivial reason. Someone present at the scene recorded the entire incident and later uploaded it on social media. As soon as the police were notified of the viral video they began looking into the matter. The report also mentioned that the video was nearly 3-month old.

We found a tweet from October 9 posted by Sitapur Police. The tweet carried a video statement by Shri Raju Kumar Sab, CO Sadar, who states that the viral video is 2-months old and is from a Kishori Sanskrit Vidyalaya in the Sidhuali region. He also mentioned that the teacher Acharya Satish Joshi was taken into police custody and was being questioned.

थाना सिधौली क्षेत्रांतर्गत शिक्षक/आचार्य द्वारा छात्र की पिटाई के प्रकरण में दि.08.10.23 को सुसंगत धाराओ में अभियोग पंजीकृत है,आरोपी को हिरासत में लेकर नियमानुसार विधिक कार्यवाही की जा रही है।इस संबंध में सीओ सदर श्री राजू कुमार साव द्वारा दी गयी बाइट-@Uppolice @CMOfficeUP pic.twitter.com/Lg9TdNT1mV

— Sitapur Police (@sitapurpolice) October 9, 2023

Alt News reached out to DSP Shobhit Kumar, CO Sidhauli, for further clarification on the matter. He said: “There is no caste angle in this matter. The institution, where the incident happened, is a private boarding school where students live on the premises. But the child in the viral video kept going back to his home, which led the teacher to punish the child by beating him up. An FIR was registered against the teacher under relevant sections and he was arrested.”

We came across a video report by News Time Nation on the matter. The video shows a clip of Sitapur police meeting the students of the school and asking if any such incident happened again. In the video, the students can be heard saying that teacher, Satish Joshi, left in July.

Hence, the claim that in the viral video the child was being beaten by the teacher because he is Dalit is false. Neither is it an RSS training camp. The video is from a private boarding school where the teacher beat up a child as he kept going back to home instead of staying on the school premises. The man has been arrested.

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