Free food post draws firestorm for Indian man at Laurier U.
Online comments wrongly claim he earns $98K a year
Mehul Prajapati says he hasn’t left his room in days. He shakes from anxiety when his phone buzzes, he says.
Messages from strangers fill his inbox. “Get out of my country,” he’s been told. “You’re not safe here anymore,” says another. “F---ing swine.”
Last weekend, Prajapati found himself at the centre of an online storm after a video he posted sparked anger and some misinformation about him.
Prajapati is a student at Wilfrid Laurier University who came to Canada from India in 2022. About a month ago, he started posting video guides for newcomers and students on Instagram, to help them acclimate. Topics included how to file taxes.
In his latest video that’s he’s since deleted, he shared how he made use of a program at his school that provides food insecure students with free groceries weekly.
Prajapati didn’t specify that the program is a last resort for hungry students, something that drew ire online. Instead, he said it’s how he saves “hundreds of bucks every month.”
Thousands of commenters online took this to mean Prajapati was treating the food program like a budgeting hack.
The story snowballed. Online commenters claimed he is a welloff data scientist for TD Bank who liked to pilfer from food charities.
Once the bank was tipped off about this reprehensible behaviour, the stories claimed, the institution fired him.
None of this, he says, is true. Prajapati did a co-op at TD for about four months last year and no longer works there, according to documents shared with the Star and a statement from the bank.
Prajapati told the Star he has limited means and has had trouble affording food “many times.”
“I am an international student and I come from a humble family without many resources,” he said.
In a Twitter thread seen more than 680,000 times, an account calling itself the “youth wing” of the PPC wrote that people such as Prajapati should be deported for contributing to the issue of “food bank abuse by immigrants and international students.”
Some posted about sending emails complaining about Prajapati to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, elected officials, local food banks, his school and his former employer.
The program Prajapati was using is not a food bank and nothing he has done constitutes a crime or breach of his immigration conditions.
One of the most popular posts targeting Prajapati, seen more than 730,000 times, was authored by Canadian right-wing activist Anna Slatz, in which she incorrectly stated Prajapati “has a job as a bank data scientist for TD Canada, a position that averages $98,000 per year.”
This online claim appears to have originated from a misreading of Prajapati’s now-deleted LinkedIn account. Images of this account before it was deleted, which Prajapati shared with the Star, show he called himself a “passionate data scientist.” His work history listed him as having done a four-month business insights and analytics co-op at TD.
Slatz told the Star that Prajapati could not be food insecure because of what she saw on his social media account, pointing out that he owns musical instruments, and saying he had been pictured going to restaurants.
“While death threats are never OK, this entire debacle appears to have been fuelled by Prajapati’s own words and actions on his social media,” she said in an email to the Star.
Slatz said she is being attacked online by Prajapati sympathizers, some of whom have posted about wanting her home address so they could “hunt her down” or send someone to harm her. She said she has contacted the police.
“I have received death threats that I would bet far eclipse the intensity and abusiveness any Prajapati would have received, though of course it is not a competition. Death threats suck to receive.”
On that last point, Prajapati would agree. He said he’s been traumatized by the week’s events.
“I feel terrible,” said Prajapati. “I started questioning myself after all the hatred I got. Am I that bad, as a person? It got to the point where if my phone, or even somebody else’s phone, vibrates, I start shivering.”
Another challenge has been dealing with blowback in India, where gossip about Prajapati is also being widely circulated online. He and his brother have spent days trying to correct the record on both fronts.
In a statement to the Star, a Laurier spokesperson said the school has offered Prajapati supports amid the “malicious and harmful online abuse” he is enduring.
Prajapati said help from the school, which has included counselling, is what’s getting him through the darkness of this moment.
Many international students suffer from food insecurity and survive with the help of food banks.
Cost of living, including tuition, is soaring and the income from the precarious work available to newcomers isn’t always enough for three meals a day. (In spite of all this, international students contribute $22 billion to the Canadian economy annually and support 200,000 jobs.)
“Food banks and food charities are a last resort, I’m not familiar with any stories of anyone going to a food bank who didn’t need to,” said Lori Nikkel, CEO of Second Harvest, an organization that supplies food charities across the country and researches food access issues, in an email to the Star.
In November, the Ste. Louis Outreach Centre of Peel food bank in Brampton was criticized by fellow food charities for banning international students.
The food bank’s board president told the Star international students are required to prove to the government they have sufficient income to support themselves, thus they should have no need of charity.
In Canada, excluding Quebec, international students must prove they have at least $10,000 per year to live on after tuition. This works out to about $833 per month.