Fact Check: The man seen in the viral video is not Congress MLA Anil Upadhyay, fake claim viral

New Delhi (Vishvas News). A video is going viral on social media these days. In the video, a man is seen praising PM Modi. By sharing the video, it is being claimed that the name of the person seen in the video is Anil Upadhyay and he is a Congress MLA. When Vishvas News investigated the viral post, it was found that the viral claim is false. The name of the person seen in the video viral is Mohan Chandra Pandey and he is not associated with any party.

What’s in the viral post?

While sharing the viral video, Facebook user Avdhesh Bhadoriya has written that Congress MLA Anil Upadhyay ji has spoken the truth after all.

Several other users on social media have shared the video with similar claims.

Investigation

Vishvas News used the InVID tool to take out screen grabs of the viral video and used Google reverse search tool to reach the original source. During this we found the viral video uploaded on a Twitter account named @Shanktan on 10th April 2019. According to the information given in the caption, the name of the person is Munna Chandra Pandey.

Based on this information, we searched on Google through some keywords. We found an account named Mohan Chandra Pandey on Facebook. This user and the person seen in the viral video looked the same. On checking the account, we found that the user often makes such videos and shares them on his Facebook account. Meanwhile, we found a video uploaded on Mohan Chandra Pandey’s Facebook account on 10 April 2019. This was the same video which is being spread by some people in the name of Congress MLA Anil Upadhyay. You can watch the original video here.

We started searching about Congress MLA Anil Upadhyay on Myneta.info to take the search forward. Records of MLAs and MPs from across the country are available on this website. But we did not find any mention here of any MLA and MP named Anil Upadhyay, who is currently associated with the Congress.

For more information, we got in touch with Congress Party’s Uttar Pradesh spokesperson Abhimanyu Tyagi. We shared the viral claim with them via WhatsApp. He told us that the viral claim is false. This video is fake. The person seen in the video has nothing to do with the Congress party. People are sharing such false claims to tarnish the image of the party.

We also got in touch with Mohan Chandra Pandey. He told us that the viral claim is false. “These are my personal views, I do not belong to any party.” He told us that “the video which is going viral now in the name of Congress MLA Anil Upadhyay has gone viral on social media many times before. I have no relation with any political party. Whatever video I make, I make it as a common man. However, some people give it a political color and make it viral with a false claim.”

At the end of the investigation, we did social scanning of Facebook user Avdhesh Bhadoriya who shared this post. We came to know that the user has more than 3 thousand 6 hundred friends on Facebook. While 21 people follow Avdhesh Bhadoriya on Facebook.