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| - Fact Check: This is not IAS officer Vijay Singh lashing out at the West over their 'colonial mindset'
A video of a man heavily criticising Western countries for their "colonial mindset" and for stealing India's resources is circulating on social media with the claim that he is IAS officer Vijay Singh speaking for our country on a global platform.
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India Today Fact Check
The man in the video is Vijay Prashad, a historian and journalist. He was speaking at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year.
A video of a man heavily criticising Western countries for their “colonial mindset” and for stealing India’s resources is circulating on social media with the claim that he is IAS officer Vijay Singh speaking for our country on a global platform.
AFWA probe
One can see the “COP26 Coalition” logo on the upper right-hand corner of the screen, which gave us a clue that the video might be linked to the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The event was held in Glasgow, Scotland, from October 31 to November 13, 2021.
Using keyword search, we found the same video uploaded on the YouTube channel “COP26 Coalition”. According to the video description, the man speaking is Vijay Prashad from Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and he was speaking at the COP26 Coalition’s People’s Summit for Climate Justice.
Taking a cue from this, we looked for the Twitter handle of Vijay Prashad. According to the bio, he is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, journalist, and the editor of LeftWord Books, a Marxist publishing house based in New Delhi.
We then reached out to Prashad, who in an email conversation confirmed to us that the man in the viral video is indeed him, but he is not an IAS officer.
“I am not an IAS officer. Not sure how the IAS story came about. One of the tricks of social media, I’m sure. I am the director of a research institute (Tricontinental) and a journalist (Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter). I was in Glasgow due to my work as director of Tricontinental,” Prashad told AFWA.
Also, on January 23, 2022, he had posted a tweet rubbishing the social media rumour.
From @BrutIndia comes a new packaged version of my speech at #COP26 - https://t.co/ImusYCFDye. It occasioned a rumour in Indian WhatsApp groups that I am a member of the Indian Administration Service; later I will reveal my lack of success at such exams (including IIT-JEE). — Vijay Prashad (@vijayprashad) January 23, 2022
Prashad’s COP26 speech was carried by multiple media reports in 2021.
A report by News18 also says he is an Indian historian and journalist, and the video is from Prashad’s participation in a panel discussion at COP26, where he pointed out the West’s “colonial mindset” when it comes to action on climate change.
As the video went viral across the world, “Global Times" had also interviewed Prashad regarding his COP26 speech.
IAS Vijay Singh
We could find the names of multiple IAS officers by the name Vijay Singh. A prominent IAS officer called Vijay Singh is a 1970-batch officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre.
He was the defence secretary between 2007 and 2009; secretary, ministry of road, transport, and highways; and chief secretary to the MP government.
It is, however, clear that the man in the viral video is historian Vijay Prashad and not an IAS officer.
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