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| - A video of Swami Avimukteshwaranand, Shankaracharya of Jyotish Peeth in Uttarakhand, talking to the media is being shared on social media.
Users have claimed that the sage was beaten up in a lathicharge at the 2025 Kumbh Mela. The post also blamed the Yogi Adityanath-led state government in Uttar Pradesh for the incident.
This claim comes at a time when the Shankaracharya has been critical of the UP government due to the alleged mismanagement at the Kumbh Mela, which led to a fatal stampede in late January.
What we found: We divided the video into multiple screenshots and ran a Google reverse image search on some of them.
We came across the same video on Facebook on a page called 1008.Guru from 28 September 2015. It was uploaded with the caption, "Lathi on Kashi, lathi on Sanatan Dharma." (translated from Hindi to English)
Taking a cue from the caption, we ran a relevant keyword search and came across multiple news reports about an incident from 2015.
According to a report by the Indian Express from 2015, it stated, Avimukteshwaranand, along with other saints and local residents, demonstrated against the government decision disallowing the immersion of Ganesh idols in the Ganga river after an Allahabad High Court judgment that prohibited idol immersion in rivers.
The demonstrators were protesting with their own Ganesh idol. It was later taken in custody by the administration which arranged for its immersion at the Lakshmi Kund, a holy site in Varanasi.
We also found an Aaj Tak bulletin on this incident from 2015 where Shankaracharya can be seen amongst the police. He could be heard saying, "Beat me!" (translated from Hindi to English) in the video.
Later, in the report, the sage reiterated that they would not leave their God alone.
It should be noted that the Chief Minister of UP in 2015 was Akhilesh Yadav, belonging to the Samajwadi Party (SP).
We did not find any recent reports which suggested that the sage was dealt with like this at the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj.
Conclusion: An old video from 2015 has gone viral to falsely claim that the sage was lathicharged at the Kumbh Mela recently.
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