After India’s parliament passed a bill to reform hugely wealthy Muslim land-owning organisations, false rumours surfaced online claiming eastern Bihar state’s chief minister was attacked for supporting the legislation. But the posts feature a video that depicts an incident in March 2022.<\/h3>\n
“A youth from Bihar slapped CM Nitish Kumar for supporting the Waqf Bill,” reads the Hindi-language caption to the video\u00a0shared on Facebook<\/a> on April 4, 2025.<\/p>\n Text with a similar claim has also been overlaid on the clip, which shows a person rushing towards another man on a stage before he is shoved away.<\/p>\n Screenshot of the false post, taken on April 9, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Similar posts surfaced on Facebook<\/a> as well as\u00a0X<\/a> after India’s parliament\u00a0passed a bill<\/a> which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government argues will boost transparency to powerful Waqf boards (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n There are around two dozen of the Muslim land-owning organisations across the South Asian nation, owning some 900,000 acres (364,000 hectares), a multi-billion-dollar property empire that makes them one of the biggest landholders alongside the railways and the defence forces.<\/p>\n Opposition parties have criticised the government for pushing “polarising politics” at the expense of India’s Muslim minority of 200 million.<\/p>\n But there have been no official reports that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, an ally of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, was slapped for supporting the legislation.<\/p>\n “No such incident of attack on the chief minister happened recently,” Rupesh Jha, a spokesperson for the Bihar police, told AFP on April 9.<\/p>\n A reverse search<\/a> on Google using keyframes<\/a> of the video also found it was\u00a0posted<\/a> on the X account of the Indian news agency ANI on March 27, 2022 (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n “Bihar | A youth tried to attack CM Nitish Kumar during a program in Bakhtiarpur. The accused was later detained by the Police,” reads its caption.<\/p>\n