Mahua Moitra was recently in news for her scintillating and well informed speech in the parliament and almost all news channels ran programs about the rise of this TMC MP who seemed bold and ferocious as she attacked the ruling regime.
While some were raving about how hard Mahua had worked on her speech and how it raised the standard of contemporary debate within the parliament, there were also allegations imposed on her that asserted that she had indeed plagiarised the entire speech. It is in this context that Mahua Moitra has filed a case of criminal defamation against Zee Tv editor-in-chief Sudhir Chaudhary at the Patila House Court, New Delhi.
Her speech ‘Early Signs of Fascism’, as alleged by Chaudhary and his team was plagiarised. Chauhary had allowed the broadcasting of a program on Zee Tv that asserted that Mahua’s speech was plagiarised from an article written by author Martin Longman referring to the US President Donald Trump.
He alleged that while Mahua’s speech was making news, what we must understand that her words were not her own but rather ‘copy-pasted’ from this article. In response to the controversy doing rounds on Indian media channels, the author of this article, Longman tweeted that Mahua’s speech wasn’t plagiarised and that she had clearly attributed the fact that her speech was inspired from a poster that she had seen in the US Holocaust Museum.
The poster that she was speaking about gives put 14 warning signs that indicate if a society is going towards fascism and Mahua spoke of seven such signs of early fascism and spoke of them in the context of India.
Moitra has also moved the bench of privilege motion in parliament against Zee News and Sudhir Chaudhary for the claims they made.
