# Videos circulating in India show Muslim offenders: a Muslim man snatching a phone in Gwalior, a Muslim woman throwing slippers at a statue of Shivaji Maharaj in Pune

**Verdict: Contradicted.** This file rates a format rather than any single clip, and the format is a lie told with one word. In the two cases checked by the Indian fact-checking organisation Factly on 12 August 2026, the video was real, the incident was real, and the police response was real. Only the religious identification was invented. In Gwalior, police named the man detained after a phone snatching and the station house officer stated he does not belong to the Muslim community. In Pune, the senior police inspector handling a case over slippers thrown at a statue of Shivaji Maharaj stated the woman arrested is not Muslim. Both claims were rated false. Nothing here asserts that any of these people did what they are accused of; both matters are with the police, no court has found anything, and this file takes no view on the underlying incidents. What it rates is the communal label welded on afterwards, and that label is a fabrication with a documented history of preceding mob violence.

Category: Hoaxes & Pop Culture · Era: 2020s · First circulated: The format is long-running in Indian social media; the two instances anchoring this file circulated in the week of 8 to 12 August 2026 and were both checked by Factly on 12 August · Believed by: A large Indian social-media audience on WhatsApp, X and Facebook, reached through short clips of genuine incidents whose captions supply an identification the footage cannot show
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/communal-misidentification-india

## Summary
Two videos went around India this week. In one, two sisters on a scooter in Gwalior chase down and catch a man who has snatched their phone. In the other, a woman throws slippers at a statue of Shivaji Maharaj in a Pune suburb and is detained. Both happened. Both were filmed. Both produced police cases. The captions added one thing each: that the man was Muslim, that the woman was Muslim. Factly checked both on 12 August and both were false. Gwalior police named the accused and the station house officer said he is not from the Muslim community; in Pune the senior inspector on the case said the woman arrested is not Muslim either. This is the cheapest fabrication in circulation, because it requires no editing at all, and the hardest to catch, because reverse image search confirms the video is genuine and stops there. The only thing that settles it is a named officer answering a phone. This file keeps two things apart: what happened, which is a matter for the police and is not judged here, and the religious identification, which was invented.

## The claim
That viral videos of ordinary crimes and public-order incidents in India routinely document Muslim offenders, and that the religious identity attached to such clips in their captions is reliable information about who was involved.

## Origin and timeline
- 2026-08-08: In Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, two sisters riding a scooter, named in local reporting as Harshita and Rishita Agarwal, are robbed of a phone by a man on a motorcycle. They give chase, catch him, and hand him to the local police. A first information report is filed. The incident is covered by several news outlets and the footage circulates.
- 2026-08-10: In Sasane Nagar, Pune, Maharashtra, a woman throws slippers at a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and is detained. Footage shows her surrounded by people, with ink smeared on her face, and with female police officers present. Kalepadal Police Station files a case the same day and makes an arrest, and says it is investigating why she did it.
- 2026-08 (both cases): As each clip spreads, the captions add an identification the footage cannot support. The Gwalior video is shared as two women thrashing a Muslim man who snatched their phone. The Pune video is shared as a Muslim woman throwing slippers at the statue. Nothing visible in either clip establishes anybody's religion.
- 2026-08-12: Factly publishes on the Gwalior clip. Reverse image searches on keyframes lead to the original news coverage of the 8 August incident. The organisation contacts Padav Police Station, and the station house officer, Shailendra Bhargava, states that the man detained is Manpreet Singh, son of Jaspal Singh, a native of Punjab, and that he does not belong to the Muslim community. The claim is rated false.
- 2026-08-12: Factly publishes on the Pune clip the same day. Keyframe searches lead to media posts carrying the same visuals from 10 August. The organisation contacts Kalepadal Police Station, and Senior Police Inspector Girisha Nimbalkar states that the woman involved is Ashwini Dagde and is not Muslim, and confirms a case was filed and an arrest made on 10 August. The claim is rated false.
- 2026-08-12: Two checks on one day, in two states, on two unrelated incidents, running the identical operation. That is the reason this file exists: not either clip on its own, but the format they share.
- Longer run: The format has a documented history in India, and it belongs to the same family as the rumor-driven mob violence covered in our files on child-snatching panics and lynching rumors. A false communal identification attached to a real, filmed incident is one of the more dangerous artifacts in circulation, because it arrives with proof of the incident already attached.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The video is genuine, so the caption describing who is in it must be reliable too.
  Evidence: These are separate claims and only the first one can be checked by looking. In both August cases the footage was authentic and the incidents happened as filmed, which is precisely what makes the format effective: a viewer who verifies the clip finds it real and stops. Religion is not visible in a scooter chase or in a crowd around a statue. The caption is supplying information that the camera never recorded, and it is the only part that was invented.
- Claim: Fact-checkers cannot really disprove someone's religion, so these debunks are just assertion.
  Evidence: They are not assertions, and how they were established is the most useful thing here. In Gwalior, Factly contacted Padav Police Station and the station house officer, Shailendra Bhargava, gave the detained man's name and parentage and said he is not from the Muslim community. In Pune, Senior Police Inspector Girisha Nimbalkar named the woman arrested and said she is not Muslim. Both are identified officers speaking on the record about cases their stations are handling, which is the strongest form of identification available short of a court record.
- Claim: This is an isolated mistake rather than a pattern.
  Evidence: Two independent instances, in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, on unrelated incidents four days apart, both checked and both false on the same day, is not a coincidence of captioning. The same operation runs on each: take a real clip of a real offence, leave the footage untouched, and add a religious identity. The Indian fact-checking ecosystem processes this format continuously, which is why two arrived in a single day's output.
- Claim: The standard verification toolkit will catch this.
  Evidence: It will not, and that is the technical point worth carrying away. Reverse image search establishes that a clip is old, or from elsewhere, or synthetic. None of those apply here. AI detectors return nothing because nothing was generated. Metadata is intact because the file was not manipulated. Every method this site normally documents comes back clean, because the fabrication is not in the video. It is in a sentence typed beside it, and the only instrument that reaches it is a reporter telephoning the officer who has the file.
- Claim: Correcting the identity is pedantic when a crime clearly took place.
  Evidence: The identity is the entire payload. A phone snatching in Gwalior is a local matter for the Padav police; the same clip captioned to name a community is an argument about that community, distributed nationally. That conversion is the purpose of the edit, and its consequences are documented: rumors attaching criminality to a group have preceded mob attacks in India often enough that fact-checkers treat this format as urgent rather than trivial. On the incidents themselves this file says nothing. Both are with the police, neither has been to court, and everyone involved keeps the presumption of innocence.

## Why people believe it
- Everything checkable checks out. The video is real, the location is real, the arrest is real, and a person who verifies those things has done more than most and still ends up with the false part intact.
- The claim arrives as description rather than argument. A caption saying who is in a video reads like a caption, not like a political statement, and it slips past the scepticism that an explicit argument would trigger.
- It confirms an expectation that heavy media exposure has already built. Somebody who has seen dozens of clips captioned this way experiences the next one as consistent with a pattern, when the pattern is an artefact of the captioning rather than of the incidents.
- There is no visible seam. Manipulated media leaves traces that people have been trained to look for, and this format leaves none, because nothing was manipulated. The absence of tampering registers as authenticity for the whole package.
- Corrections cannot travel the same route. Establishing the truth here took two phone calls to two police stations in two states, which is slow, local, and unshareable, while the claim needed one sentence and no work at all.

## Open questions
- How much of this format is coordinated and how much is individual reflex is not established by either check. Two instances in one day show the shape is widespread; they do not show who is typing the captions or why.
- Whether the corrections reach the audiences that saw the originals is undocumented and, on the evidence of how such things usually move, unlikely. Neither check reports circulation figures for the false version or the correction.
- Whether police statements are a durable remedy is unclear. They worked in both August cases because officers answered and spoke on the record, and there is no reason to assume that will hold in every case, or that a denial reaches the people who saw the accusation.

## Latest developments
- 2026-08-12T13:35Z: Opening entry, built off two Factly checks published within five hours of each other on 12 August. The pairing is the argument. One clip is from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and shows a phone snatching on 8 August; the other is from a Pune suburb and shows slippers thrown at a statue on 10 August. Different states, unrelated incidents, no shared footage, and the same single fabrication in each: a religious identity the camera never recorded. Both were settled the same way, by an identified police officer stating on the record who the person actually is. If further instances are checked, they belong here rather than in new files, because the instance is never the story. (source: https://factly.in/the-phone-snatcher-caught-by-sisters-in-gwalior-is-not-a-muslim/)

## Sources
- The phone snatcher caught by sisters in Gwalior is not a Muslim, Factly (2026): https://factly.in/the-phone-snatcher-caught-by-sisters-in-gwalior-is-not-a-muslim/
- The woman who threw slippers at the Shivaji Maharaj statue in Sasane Nagar, Pune, is not Muslim, Factly (2026): https://factly.in/the-woman-who-threw-slippers-at-the-shivaji-maharaj-statue-in-sasane-nagar-pune-is-not-muslim/
- Factly (International Fact-Checking Network signatory), Factly (2026): https://factly.in/
- Shivaji (background on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and his standing in Maharashtra), Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivaji
- Gwalior, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwalior
- Misinformation in India (background on the WhatsApp-driven rumor environment), Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_in_India

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/communal-misidentification-india