CLAIM
On 2 July, Zee News Hindi tweeted a 7:47 minute-long video from its prime time show, Daily News and Analysis hosted by editor-in-chief Sudhir Chaudhary. In the video, Chaudhary claimed that the maiden speech delivered by Trinamool Congress lawmaker Mahua Moitra on 25 June in Lok Sabha was plagiarised.
He took to Twitter and shared images of an article titled as ‘The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism’ and claimed that Moitra ‘stole’ words from it.
Now Zee News is not the only one who claimed that the TMC parliamentarian had read a plagiarised speech. Several other prominent leaders also alleged the same on Twitter.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The claim made by Zee News is false.
The aforementioned article, with the headline ‘The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism’, published by the Washington Monthly in 2017 was written by Martin Longman. In his article, Longman had referred to a poster that highlighted early signs of fascism and mentioned that it could be found hanging at the US Holocaust Museum.
In her speech, Moitra was referring to the same poster.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
In her maiden speech video, at 9:12 minutes, she can be heard saying, “In 2017, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum put up a poster in its main lobby and it contained a list of all the signs of early fascism. Each of the seven signs I have pointed to you, features on that poster.”
Further, the TMC parliamentarian released a press statement. An excerpt from the statement reads, ‘My source as mentioned categorically in my speech was the poster from the Holocaust Museum created by the political scientist Dr Laurence W. Brit pointing out the 14 signs of early fascism. I found 7 signs relevant to Indian and spoke at length about each of them.’
While she mentioned that the poster with early signs of fascism was displayed at a museum in US, however that’s not true. In 2017, American fact-checking website Snopes had debunked the fact that the poster was not exhibited in the museum but was available in its gift shop for sometime.
Coming back to Longman’s article, in a series of tweets he denied that the politicial in question had plagiarised.
Despite the fact that Mahua had issued a press statement clarifying all concerns regarding her speech, Sudhir Chaudhary now tweeted that she had quoted the article ‘out of context.’
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