A BJP Yuva Morcha member, who is known for circulating false Islamophobic content on social media, has been arrested after he shared a post claiming that a Muslim boy had killed a Hindu girl for refusing to enter prostitution at his insistence, with the allegation accompanied by a collage of images, despite police urging him to remove it from his social media account.
The arrest followed a series of posts shared on X by Shaurya Mishra, who later turned out to be Hariom Mishra, a resident of Kaushambi district in Uttar Pradesh, in which he alleged that a 24-year-old college student named Nikita Agarwal had been murdered in Gurugram by her classmate Arif Khan after she resisted alleged coercion and blackmail, according to The Wire.
Mishra claimed that the two were in a relationship for around six months, during which they allegedly met frequently at hotels instead of attending college, and that Khan secretly recorded private videos and photographs of Nikita, which he later used to pressure her into relationships with wealthy men.
According to the post, when Nikita objected to the alleged demands and threatened to approach the police, Khan purportedly planned her murder, lured her to a hotel under the pretext of deleting the videos, and, along with three hotel associates, allegedly held her hostage, sexually assaulted her, strangled her to death, and disposed of her body in a forest.
Mishra further claimed that the police recovered the body three days later, arrested the accused, and sent them to judicial custody, while citing unnamed sources and law enforcement authorities to lend credibility to the narrative.
The post gained significant traction, drawing over 1.5 lakh views, and was amplified by several right-wing social media handles, including parody and propaganda accounts followed by BJP leaders, while the same claims and images circulated widely on Facebook and Instagram pages aligned with similar ideological leanings. However, a search of credible news reports revealed no such incident in Gurugram, and the police publicly clarified that the claims were entirely false and fabricated.
Despite an official denial and a warning from Gurugram Police that spreading false information could invite legal action, Mishra neither deleted the post nor issued a clarification, leading the police to register an FIR and arrest him a week later.
Investigations revealed that the claim appeared to deliberately portray a Hindu woman as a victim of Muslim men, thereby attempting to incite communal hatred, while police stated that they were also probing the motive behind the dissemination of the false narrative.
Further verification showed that the images used in the viral collage were lifted from the internet, with some traced to a social media influencer’s Pinterest account and others to unrelated Instagram pages, clearly depicting different individuals unrelated to the fabricated story.
The police have stated that Mishra remains under interrogation, while the false post continues to circulate online despite his arrest.