A collage of two videos is going viral. One video shows Smriti Singh, the wife of martyred Captain Anshuman Singh, receiving the Kirti Chakra award from the President of India. The other video features a woman who closely resembles Smriti Singh posing for the camera (here & here). This collage is being shared with claims that the woman posing in the second video is Smriti Singh, and it is linked to the ongoing discussion about her receiving financial assistance instead of Captain Singh’s parents. This article fact-checks the claims made in the post.
Claim: A video showing Smriti Singh, the wife of martyred Captain Anshuman Singh, posing for the camera.
Fact: The woman featured in the viral video is not Smriti Singh, the wife of martyred Captain Anshuman Singh. She is a model named Reshma Sebastian, who posted the video on her Instagram account on 24 April 2024. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Captain Anshuman Singh was posthumously awarded the Kirti Chakra, India’s second-highest peacetime gallantry honour. His wife, Smriti Singh, accepted the award during a ceremony on 05 July 2024. Following this, the family became involved in a couple of controversies.
As images of Smriti Singh receiving the award went viral on social media, she faced a barrage of lewd remarks. The National Commission for Women (NCW) took the incident seriously and wrote a letter to the Delhi Commissioner of Police, urging prompt action against the culprits. Fake news also circulated on social media, sharing an image and falsely claiming that the police had arrested the person responsible for the remarks. Factly debunked these claims and a detailed fact-check article can be read here.
Another controversy has erupted involving Smriti Singh. Days after their son was posthumously awarded the Kirti Chakra, India’s second-highest peacetime gallantry honour, Captain Anshuman Singh’s parents called for revisions to the Indian Army’s ‘next of kin’ (NOK) policy. This policy determines the allocation of financial assistance to families in the event of an army personnel’s death
The family received Rs 1 crore in financial assistance from the Army Group Insurance Fund, which was split evenly between Anshuman’s parents and his wife. Following this, the parents of the martyr expressed their dissatisfaction, claiming that their daughter-in-law received the honour and departed, leaving them with nothing. They have called for changes to the Army’s financial assistance rules for martyrs’ families (here & here). Against this backdrop, a viral video alleges that the woman featured is the martyr’s wife and the recipient of the Rs. 1 crore assistance.
Woman posing is not Smriti Singh:
Contrary to the viral claim, the woman seen in the video is not Captain Anshuman Singh’s wife, Smriti Singh. A reverse image search of screenshots from the viral video directed us to the Instagram profile of an engineer and model named Reshma Sebastian. The video currently circulating was uploaded to her account on 24 April 2024.
She also shared her experience of speaking at ‘TEDxStTeresasCollege’. While this model bears slight resemblance to Smriti Singh, closer scrutiny reveals significant differences.
To sum up, the video of a model posing for the camera is mistakenly shared as that of Smriti Singh, the wife of the martyred Captain Anshuman Singh.
