The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tuesday were caught in a war of words in the wake of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s damning statements about the Indian government’s alleged censorship demands at the time of the farmers’ protest in the country.
“The mother of democracy is seeing the murder of democracy in broad daylight and people are being coaxed into submission,” Congress spokesperson and chairperson of the party’s social media department Supriya Shrinate said at a press conference at the party headquarters.
BJP national general secretary B. L. Santosh, meanwhile, condemned the Congress response to Dorsey’s charges and advised the opposition party to “grow up”.
At the press conference, Shrinate, citing Dorsey’s statement, alleged that the Modi government had asked Twitter to block accounts showing the farmers’ protests, failing which the company would be raided.
In an interview to a YouTube channel, Twitter founder and former CEO Dorsey has said that the Indian government had threatened to block the platform in the country.
“India is a country that had many requests of us around the farmers’ protests, around particular journalists that were critical of the government,” Dorsey said in the interview. “And it manifested in ways such as, ‘We shut down Twitter in India’, which is a very large market for us. ‘We’re going to 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.”
After Dorsey’s statements created waves, Electronics & Technology minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar called the Twitter ex-CEO’s statement ‘an outright lie’.
Former IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also said that the social media giant did not comply with Indian laws at the time.
Senior BJP leader Santosh called out the Congress party’s tendency to jump “like a bunch of vultures”.
Piling up the pressure on the government, Shrinate alleged that it was intimidating social media platforms to block voices of the opposition.
It was due to Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra which showed a “mirror” to the government that such methods were being used, the Congress spokesperson said.
(With inputs from agencies)
