- Sunday, March 02, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Social media giant Twitter has been accused of giving in to government pressure in India by blocking several journalists, politicians and activists from its platform in recent times.
According to a report by The Guardian, the Indian government asked Twitter to get rid of people in the aftermath of an internet shutdown in the northern state of Punjab during the manhunt for Amritpal Singh, a Sikh separatist leader.
It was reported that Twitter agreed to bar more than 120 accounts, including those of Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh, Canadian poet Rupi Kaur besides an Indian parliamentarian and several journalists.
Even the handle of BBC’s Punjabi bureau was blocked.
Jaskaran Sandhu, co-founder of Baaz News, which focuses on the Sikh diaspora, got an email from Twitter on March 21 that said his account has been withheld in the Asian country. The Guardian, which saw the email, said in its report that no specific tweet or activity by Toronto-based Sandhu was cited by the social media platform for the action it took.
“The Indian government has made it a norm to take draconian measures and crack down on dissent coming from Sikh or other minority communities,” Sandhu was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“Twitter’s actions are just another example [that imply] civil liberties and democratic rights are under attack,” he added.
He said his entire account and not just a tweet was banned in India and called it a “blanket censorship”. He also accused the US-based company of maintaining absolute silence on the matter.
Freedom House, a US-based nonprofit organisation, accused the government of prime minister Narendra Modi of “driving India toward authoritarianism”. In 2021, it downgraded India’s status from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’.
India is the third-largest market for Twitter after the US and Japan.
Responding to a tweet about censorship in India, Elon Musk, who took over Twitter in October and describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”, tweeted: “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things.”
In July, Twitter sued the government over takedown orders, after the latter came up with legislation in 2021 to regulate every form of digital content and empower itself to remove content that it considered “objectionable”.
