A video of a local politician from Delhi is viral with a false claim that a Congress MLA named Anil Upadhyay criticised his own party. BOOM found that the person in the video is a Vinay Singh of Janashakti party misidentified as the fictitious Anil Upadhyay a name that been used to spread misinformation on numerous ocassions.
The video is being shared with the claim, "Congress MLA Anil Upadhyay unknowingly spoke out, but spoke the complete truth. Make this VIDEO viral, so that the entire Nation can see it."
In the video the man calls out Congress, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and asks why they did not say anything in the parliament against the CAA. He then says about a 100 people including politicians and journalists should be jailed and everything will be set right.
FACT CHECK
In 2019, BOOM did a round-up of misinformation and disinformation that was peddled using the name MLA 'Anil Upadhyay'. The fake persona has been invented to spread a number of false claims. In some instances, the text claim Anil Upadhyay as a Bharatiya Janata Party MLA.
Read here - Meet Anil Upadhyay, A Fictional Politician Made Up By India's Fake News Brigade
We had then run a search on MyNeta for BJP and Congress leaders by the name of Anil Upadhyay and did not find any person by the name ever contesting an election.
For the current viral video, we noticed a logo with the words The Newspaper Exclusive and found a Facebook page for a Delhi-based local news channel, The Newspaper. We noticed that the page had changed its name to The Newspaper from The Newspaper Exclusive. While a search for the viral video did not show results on the Facebook page, we found the same uploaded on their YouTube page on March 5, 2020.
In the YouTube upload the channel identifies the man only as 'Professor' and the video title says, 'Rahul Gandhi पर प्रोफेसर ने ऐसा क्या कहा कि लोगों ने गोद में उठा लिया | Delhi'
In the video, the man is heard criticising Congress leaders including Rahul Gandhi and also calling out some journalists. The video does not name him and only refers to him as The Professor.
We then looked through the YouTube channel's other videos and found an upload from March 7, 2021 where they identify the same man as Professor Vinay Singh a local leader from Delhi.
We then searched for Vinay Singh politician Delhi and found a FirstPost and a MyNeta link for a leader by the same name from Janashakti Party who contested from the Patparganj constituency.