By Sarosh Bana, Mumbai Correspondent
The knives are out between the Indian government and Twitter, with police teams swooping on the American microblogging platform’s offices in Delhi and neighbouring Gurugram as a reprisal against its calling out malevolent posts by ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders.
As the Twitter offices were shut owing to the Covid-19 situation, Manish Maheshwari, managing director of its India operations, was summoned instead to the police station. He did not comply, saying he was not the authorised representative in such matters, but the outrage at his India office has reached his firm’s global headquarters in San Francisco that has now stepped in to closely coordinate with the India team. Twitter is also consulting its deputy general counsel and Vice President (legal) Jim Baker, formerly from the FBI, in the matter.
It is likely that the US government is approached by Twitter as the police action against it may have international implications. Twitter has 32 office locations across 19 countries.
What caused the flashpoint was the Narendra Modi government’s penchant for “good offence is the best defence”. It opened another front in its Twitter war against the opposition Congress party, seeking to disgrace it at a time its relief efforts for patients in need of help are winning it and its leadership widespread appreciation on social media.
A recent Tweet by the chief BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra hosted screenshots of a purported Congress ‘toolkit’ – a term popularised of late by the government to point to ‘anti-national’ and ‘seditious’ activities – that supposedly presented a gameplan enunciating a range of social media directives to party workers for discrediting Prime Minister Modi for his disastrous handling of the pandemic.
Patra’s Tweet mentioned: “Friends, look at the #CongressToolKit in extending help to the needy during the pandemic! More of a PR exercise with the help of ‘friendly journalists’ & ‘influencers’ than a soulful endeavour. Read for yourselves the agenda of the Congress: #CongressToolKitExposed.”
Curiously, the ‘toolkit’ is shown as specifying: “Amplify work of frontal Congress organisations: Indian Youth Congress can be shown as taking the lead in helping people. Contrast their work with apathy and inertia of the government as well as BJP organisations.” Thereafter, there is a list of requirements while responding to calls for help, for example, “Create a social media team to track every request for help and contact them on DMs (direct messages) directly”.
The “toolkit” accusation was on cue taken up by a host of BJP Ministers and leaders, including BJP president J.P. Nadda, as well as by the ruling party’s ideological progenitor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is an extremist Hindu paramilitary volunteer organisation. They also held that since the ‘toolkit’ blamed the recent massive Hindu religious congregation, kumbh mela, for being a superspreader of the virus, it exposed the Congress’s ‘anti-Hindu’ bias and its intent to cause communal disharmony and civil unrest in the country.
The Congress immediately denounced the ‘toolkit’ as a fabrication and filed a police complaint against all the BJP and RSS functionaries concerned for fraud and forgery. It charged them with using Twitter as a platform to disseminate “false information” that could “cause social unrest in the country, amidst the current pandemic”. A letter written by head of Congress’s research team Rajeev Gowda and its social media team chief Rohan Gupta, moreover, condemned the BJP for perpetrating the fraud “to divert attention from the Modi government’s mammoth failure in providing necessary aid to the people of India, amidst the current pandemic”. The party also wrote to Twitter, asking the social media giant to remove the offensive tweets and permanently suspend the accounts of those who shared the fake ‘toolkit’.
In a humiliating setback for the ruling dispensation, Twitter officially flagged Patra’s Tweet as ‘manipulated media’, explaining in its policies section: “…we may label Tweets that include media (videos, audio, and images) that have been deceptively altered or fabricated. In addition, you may not share deceptively altered media on Twitter in ways that mislead or deceive people about the media’s authenticity where threats to physical safety or other serious harm may result.”
In a blog, Twitter explains, “In order to determine if media have been significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated, we may use our own technology or receive reports through partnerships with third parties.” In labelling content or removing it from the platform, Twitter assesses the severity of the fabrication and the likely harm it can cause. At times, it reduces visibility of such content, while warning users that “repeated violations” can lead to their accounts being permanently suspended.
While the government asked Twitter to remove the ‘manipulative’ tag as the matter was being investigated, the police justified their raids on grounds that “it appears that Twitter has some information that is not known to us”.
Heartened by the developments, the Congress observed, “The BJP accused us of playing with people’s sorrows at a time when the party has been making all-out efforts to ramp up its relief work; only a party like the BJP can stoop so low.”
The BJP was further shamed when AltNews, a credible fact-checking website, established that the ‘toolkit’ flaunted by its leaders had been so sloppily crafted that even the Congress party letterhead it was carried on was forged.
The ruling party and its IT cell have been frequently ridiculed on social media – the mainstream media having been completely subjugated by the present dispensation – for perpetuating false information to polarise the population and intimidate dissenters. But they continue with impunity, as they enjoy immunity from any action.
Soon after a state BJP chief minister’s warning against spreading “false information” on social media regarding lack of medical oxygen and other medical assistance, the state police have ridden roughshod over those seeking medical assistance. For instance, they registered a criminal case against a youth who had taken to Twitter in a desperate appeal for oxygen for his dying maternal grandfather.
On 23 May, four junior doctors from that state’s medical college were arrested while they were on their way to meet the chief minister with their grievances and a memorandum of issues faced by them, such as shortage of medical supplies at their hospital.
Earlier this month, the New Zealand government had to apologise to the Indian government for its High Commission in New Delhi using Twitter to request the Congress party youth wing for medical oxygen for a critically ill staffer. With the mission having locked itself down on account of Covid-19, its official @NZInIndia account Tweeted, “Could you please help with oxygen cylinder urgently at the New Zealand High Commission? Thank you.” The Congress’s youth leader Srinivas B.V. responded, delivering the required oxygen tanks, but the long-serving staffer passed away subsequently.
When the Modi government criticised the New Zealand mission for “hoarding” oxygen and receiving beneficial treatment, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued an official disapproval of her High Commission, noting, “They should have been using the normal channels and protocols.” High Commissioner David Pine too apologised to the Indian government for the blunder.
