A shocking case of plagiarism has come out in a book written by Indian Express deputy editor Sushant Singh, who is also a former army officer. The book in question is Mission Overseas: Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military. The first book written by Sushant Singh, it gives detailed accounts of Indian military in foreign countries. The book narrates Indian operations in Maldives, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, which was published in March 2017.
But now it has been revealed that the Jaffna chapter of the book contains content from an article published 9 years ago on the same topic. In 2009, military aviation historian Jagan Pillarisetti had published a series of articles under the category The Sri Lankan Interlude 1987-90 on the website Bharat Rakshak.
In that series, the article titled Chapter 3: Descent Into Danger – The Jaffna University Helidrop contains the text that finds a place in the book by Sushant Singh. The book is actually a compilation of three books, and the plagiarised content is in the book named Operation Pawan.
Last year NDTV too published an excerpt from the book, where few paras that match with the Bharat Rakshak article are there.
Here are screenshots of a few paragraphs from both and the article which show that the book uses content lifted from the Bharat Rakshak article. The content presented here has been taken from Sushant Singh’s book Operation Pawan which is available on the Juggernaut application.
First plagiarised content
Here is the excerpt from Sushant Singh’s book published by Juggernaut.
The same paragraph about can be seen in the Bharat Rakshak article written by military aviation historian Jagan Pillarisetti.
Second plagiarised content
Following is the book excerpt from the book Operation Pawan published by Juggernaut.
The exact same paragraph can be found in the article published in Bharat Rakshak 9 years ago.
Third plagiarised content
Following is another paragraph from Sushant Singh’s book Operation Pawan.
Again, the same paragraph that has been included in the book Operation Pawan, a part of Operation Overseas has been lifted from the 9-year-old article written in Bharat Rakshak.
These revelations came to light when the writer of the original content Jagan Pillarisetti commented on in a Facebook group that the book by Sushant Singh uses content from his article. He had posted the following comment in a private Facebook group, showing the portion that was plagiarised from his book.
Plagiarism is considered a serious offence while publishing any content. Sushant Singh seems to have willy-nilly taken someone else’s content which was published 9 years ago and passed it off as his own content. In the book Mission overseas, he has obviously claimed that the plagiarised content was written by him without any sort of reference to the original content written by military aviation historian Jagan Pillarisetti in his articles published on Bharat Rakshak.
It remains to be seen whether Juggernaut pulls the books down and takes punitive action against Sushant Singh.