Did Shivraj Chouhan Insult His Teacher During Speech? No, It’s a Clipped Video

A longer video shows Chouhan immediately correcting himself after realising his mistake during his address.

The claim suggests that the Madhya Pradesh chief minister insulted his teacher during his speech and used to keep his feet on his teacher's head. 

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A video of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is being shared with the claim that he insulted his teacher in front of others while addressing a crowd.

In the video, Chouhan can be heard saying, "As I mentioned before, I studied in a government school in Jait and even in Bhopal, I was in a government school. Our teacher Shridhe Ratan Chand Jain, is still among us. I used to go and all of us used to keep our feet on his head."

Chouhan was attending the teachers' training programme, which was held at Dussehra Maidan in Madhya Pradesh on 4 September 2022. In the event, the chief minister interacted with 15,000 newly hired teachers where he talked about the important role teachers play in building the future.

However, we found the video is clipped. While Chouhan did say the same sentence, a longer video shows that he instantly corrected himself after a pause and said, "To take our teacher’s blessings, we always used to keep our heads on his feet."

CLAIM

The viral post was shared by Narendra Saluja, the media coordinator for the former MP CM Kamal Nath. The video had more than 25,000 views at the time of writing this article.

While sharing the video, he wrote "मामाजी शिक्षकों के बीच आप यह क्या कह गये."

Translation: (Mamaji, what have you said in front of the teachers?)

An archive of the post can be found here. 

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

Archives of a similar posts can be found here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

At first, we noticed "Dussehra Maidan" written on the board in the background of the video.

Dussehra Maidan can be seen written on the board

(Source:Video/Screenshot)

We performed a Google search using the keywords "Shivraj Singh Chouhan Dussehra Maidan speech." This led us to a YouTube video uploaded on the verified channel of OTV titled, "MP CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan talks about his school days." The video was uploaded on 4 September.

The clip shows a part of his speech from the teachers' training programme, where he talks about his school days while emphasising the important role school education plays in a child's life.

The video starts with Chouhan saying, "As I mentioned before, I studied in a government school in Jait and even in Bhopal, I was in a government school. Our teacher Shridhe Ratan Chandra Jain is still among us. I used to go and all of us used to keep our feet on his head."

However, we found that the second part which shows the CM correcting his mistake missing from the viral video.

At around the 0:24 timestamp of the video, it can be seen that Chouhan takes a pause and immediately corrects himself. It is here when he can be heard saying:

"To take our teacher's blessing, we always used to keep our heads on his feet."

Shivraj Singh Chouhan

Further, we also found a longer clip shared by the official handle of Office of Shivraj Singh Chouhan which also shows that the CM immediately corrected himself after realising his mistake at around 41:34 timestamp.

Evidently, a clipped video of Shivraj Singh Chouhan's speech is being shared with false claims.

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