New Delhi: Soon after the former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey accused Indian government of putting pressure on the company to block Twitter accounts covering farmer protests and those critical of the BJP government, India’s Information and Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar rebutted the allegations.
In a tweet, Chandrasekhar said Dorsey’s comment is an “outright lie, perhaps an attempt to brush out a dubious period of Twitter’s history”.
He said Twitter was in “repeated and continuous violation of Indian law” and that the “Dorsey Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law”.
As a matter of fact they were in non-compliance with law repeatedly from 2020 to 2022 and it was only June 2022 when they finally complied. No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shutdown’ (sic),” he wrote.
Earlier, Dorsey in a interview with the YouTube channel Breaking Points was asked if he had faced any pressure from foreign governments.
He replied: “India, for example. India is one of the countries which had many requests around farmers protests, around particular journalists which were critical of the government, and it manifested in ways such as ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’… ‘we would raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit’. And this is India, a democratic country.”
Pertinently, the government of India hastily passed three contentious farm laws in September 2020 that deregulated farming by completely opening it to corporations, forty farm unions with tens of thousands of members responded by leading one of the world’s largest demonstrations. The protest was called off on December 9, a full 378 days later, after the government repealed the laws.
When farmers weren’t allowed to enter New Delhi, India’s capital, they camped at the city’s outskirts.
The GoI later announced the withdrawal of the laws a year later, on November 19, 2021.
Farmers; however, didn’t stop protesting: They continued pressuring government officials to approve their demands, which included compensation to the families of the hundreds of farmers who died during the protests, entitlement to minimum support prices (MSPs), and revoking legal cases against the protesting farmers.
