Hindutva outfit leaders misidentified as father of boy accused of abetting KIIT student’s suicide

Odisha’s Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) has come under fire after an international student from Nepal allegedly killed herself after being harassed by another male student. The institute administration came under further scrutiny after reports and videos and showed staff misbehaving and manhandling Nepalese students protesting against the authorities for not intervening in the case of their fellow student Prakriti Lamsal.

Lamsal, a student from Nepal, was found dead in her hostel room on Sunday, February 16. She was allegedly harassed by another student named Advik Srivastava. Protesting students claim that the college, despite knowing about the harassment, did not step in to protect Lamsal and instead took a soft stance against Srivastava. The Bhubaneshwar police, where KIIT is located, has registered a case and booked Srivastava for abetment of suicide.

Amidst this, images of two men with obvious links to Hindutva organisations have gone viral on social media. Users claimed these images were of Advik Srivastava’s father, Manoj Srivastava, and that his political reach was the reason for KIIT’s inaction. 

One such image shows an image of a man in a saffron stole juxtaposed with another picture of him from his Facebook profile where his name—ManojK Srivastava—can be read. A day after Lamsal’s body was found, X account @manav_shah2000 shared the screenshot of a Reddit post, where someone had put together the two photos. Through the post, the user also implied that the institute was protecting Srivastava because his father was a politician. (Archive)

Wonder why this College is protecting Advik Srivastava??

Answer: 👇 https://t.co/9gb59ZVIXt pic.twitter.com/e0wIvfLWLw

— Manav Shah (@manav_shah2000) February 17, 2025

Another collage, shared by X account @_JoshNeverStops on February 20, showed images of a man standing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and prominent BJP politican Smriti Irani. The user claimed that the man in the photos was Advik Srivastava’s father Manoj Srivastava, an influential BJP politician from Lucknow. (Archive)

He is Manoj Shrivastava, an influential BJP politician from Lucknow and the father of Advik Srivastava.#KIITUniversity #JusticeForPrakriti pic.twitter.com/K2PwmMdXlJ

— KeepitDope (@_JoshNeverStops) February 20, 2025

Fact Check

We fact checked the two claims and images separately and here’s what we found:

Photo 1

To check the veracity of the photo, Alt News looked for the Facebook profile shown in the image. We found one profile that matched the name and image as the viral post. According to this, Srivastava is a resident of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh and heads a Hindutva outfit, Bharatiya Kesariya Vahini. 

Alt News then contacted this person who categorically denied being linked to the Advik Srivastava accused in the KIIT incident. This man said he did have a son, but he was 16 years old and still in school.

“I am not that Manoj Srivastava. My pictures are being misused. I am being misidentified. I have only one son, who is too young to attend an engineering college, he is still in school and is in 12th standard,” this person said.

He added that he was the president of Bharatiya Kesariya Vahini since 2019 and is also a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He claimed that he has been involved in social activism for some time and was active in politics as a student. He told Alt News that he has been bullied and subjected to much abuse on all his social media accounts ever since he was misidentified as the accused’s father.

This person also posted a video on his Facebook account dismissing claims that he was associated with Advik Srivastava.

Photo 2:

While the man in the second photo is Manoj Srivastava, former district vice president of BJP Ayodhya, a post on his facebook profile shows that he is not the father of the KIIT accused.

On his Facebook profile, this man had shared a post for his son Akshat Srivastava on the latter’s birthday. While investigating, we found that his son is the MD and CEO at V.M. Auto Motor Ayodhya.

Alt News then reached out to Akshat Srivastava, who confirmed that he is the only son of the Manoj Srivastava in the picture and runs his own business. He added that his family has been residing in Lucknow for a long time and said that the claims linking his father to the KIIT accused is absolutely baseless.

Manoj Srivastava too denied any connection to Advik Srivastava. “I have only one son, Akshat Srivastava, and a daughter. I was born in Ayodhya and still live here with my family. I have no familial ties to Advik. Any claim suggesting otherwise is false,” he told Alt News.

Why Manoj Srivastava?

But Manoj Srivastava’s name did not get dragged into the incident out of thin air. Turns out, it is indeed the name of the accused’s father. But social media users misidentified him and circulated images of wrong people with the same name. Note that both Manoj and Srivastava are common first and last names in the country.  

To be sure, Alt News spoke to a journalist based in Bhubaneswar and sourced a press note by the local police. A summary of the FIR shows the name of the accused as Advik Srivastava and his father’s name as Manoj Srivastava. They are residents of Lucknow. The FIR also says that the accused was nabbed while he was trying to flee the state.

Here’s a translation of the gist of the FIR:

“Infocity Police, following a complaint from the complainant, Sidhant Sigdel, investigated the case and arrested the accused and sent him to court.

Reportedly, the victim was from Nepal and was studying at a reputed educational institution in Bhubaneswar and residing in the institution’s hostel. Two years prior, she became acquainted with the accused. Subsequently, the accused secretly took some photos and videos of her on his mobile phone. Due to some reason, a dispute arose between them. As a result, the issue was resolved twice with the help of the International Relations Offic under the educational institution, but there was no change in the accused’s behavior. Instead, the accused started harassing her again. The victim was under severe mental distress due to this incident. On 16.02.2025, there was another quarrel between them. That afternoon, her classmates found her hanging from the fan in her room. They immediately rescued her and took her to KIMS Hospital, but the doctor declared her dead.

Following a complaint, Infocity Police investigated the case and managed to arrest the accused near the airport while he was trying to flee Osidha. At that time, police also seized a mobile phone and a laptop from him. During interrogation, the accused confessed to his crime. Further investigation into the matter is ongoing.”

He has been remanded to 14 days of judicial custody.

Alt News reached out to Infocity Bhubaneswar police who told us that according to the accused, his father Manoj Srivastava is a civil engineer and contractor in Lucknow. They had no information regarding his father’s involvement with any political party.

To sum up, the men in both these viral image have been misidentified as Advik Srivastava’s father.