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| - Fact Check: Was Mahakumbh's IITian Baba a spy for Pak? No, that was a different IITian
India Today Fact Check found that the IITian in Mahakumbh and the IITian convicted for spying are two different people. Nishant Agarwal was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2024.
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India Today Fact Check
The IITian holy man in Mahakumbh, Abhey Singh, and the IITian convicted for spying are two different people. Nishant Agarwal was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2024.
In the first two days of the Mahakumbh, the world’s largest religious congregation, almost 2 crore devotees reportedly took a dip in the Sangam, a confluence of three rivers in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj. A self-styled holy man attending the Mahakumbh recently went viral on social media, with many calling him IITian Baba or the ascetic from IIT (the Indian Institute Of Technology).
It all started with an interview by CNN-News18, where this man, Abhey Singh, mentioned that he quit science for spirituality. Singh called himself an IIT Bombay Aerospace Engineering Alumnus. But a few social media users have claimed otherwise.
An X user, responding to a post about the interview, wrote: “This is Nishant Agarwal, an IIT-Ropar alumni who later became an engineer at Brahmos, but that didn't stop him from becoming an ISI spy, for which he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.”
These two, however, are not the same person. Nishant Agarwal, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2024, is not the so-called IITian Baba.
In the interview with CNN-News18, Abhey Singh said that he pursued aerodynamics engineering from IIT Bombay. We found Facebook and Instagram accounts named Abhey Singh which had multiple images and videos of the same person seen in the interview.
According to Abhey Singh’s Facebook profile, he has studied Visual Communication at the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay. We then reached out to the Academics Department at the IDC. Ashish, who works with the Academics department, told India Today Fact Check that a student named Abhey Singh pursued Visual Communication from IDC in the 2013-15 batch. On Singh’s Facebook profile, pictures of the convocation ceremony in 2015 can also be seen. Moreover, Ashish confirmed that Singh’s hometown is Jhajjar, Haryana, which Singh said in the interview and is mentioned in the Facebook profile as well.
Who is Nishant Agrawal?
According to various news reports from June 2024, a Nagpur court handed life imprisonment to ex-BrahMos Aerospace engineer Nishant Agrawal for spying for Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. On June 3, 2024, Agarwal was convicted under section 235 of the Criminal Procedure Code for an offence punishable under section 66 (f) of the IT Act and various sections of the Official Secrets Act (OSA).
Agrawal, who was first arrested in 2018, was sentenced to life imprisonment and rigorous imprisonment for 14 years in June 2024.
Agrawal was a senior system engineer with BrahMos Aerospace, a joint venture between India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation and Russia’s Military Industrial Consortium (NPO Mashinostroyenia) that works on India’s supersonic cruise missile.
Additionally, looking at Nishant Agrawal’s photograph provided in various news reports and comparing it to that of Abhey Singh’s photos proves that both are different people who don’t resemble each other at all.
It is thus clear that the IITian turned saint seen at Mahakumbh is not the same IITian who was convicted for spying for Pakistan in 2024.
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