interesting that Free Speech Warrior Elon Musk who acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars because
he believes in the principles of free speech might be working with a fascist to uh on his
aggressive censorship efforts I mean shocking shocking to hear that right yeah Elon Musk when
he took over Twitter and in the run-up to that he had a lot of very idealistic rhetoric that he
uh report as to what his motivations were it never really seemed too sincere to me but I think we're
seeing now in the way Twitter is actually being run is that he is not very committed free speech
he's willing to maybe indulge a few pet causes I think one he's particularly interested in is the
rights of conservative speech in the United States but Twitter is a global company and you know there
are countries all the world where Twitter is very important and millions of people use it
and his commitment to actually upholding free speech in where it really matters and instances
of government repression in countries which are not perfectly Democratic or undemocratic
or authoritarian it's really been lacking and I think one thing we've seen recently is that
Twitter India under the previous ownership it had a lot of pressure from the multi-government which
it resisted but now that Elon is taking power he's fired a lot of the staff in that office
and we're seeing a much more cooperation and you can say control off Twitter by the Indian
government during a period where democracy seems to be backsliding in that country well
let's let's give people some context then on that Democratic uh backslide if you don't mind Murtaza
because uh a lot of people would be familiar with Narendra Modi I'm sure uh this audience is
um but but he's come when did he come to power 2014 is that yeah that's right so he came to power
after many many years of the congress party being empowered in India which is a more uh
establishment Liberal Party of India people have a lot of complaints with that party for reasons some
of which were understandable the patronage and Corruption and so forth and he's at the helm of a
rival party called the BJP which is a religious nationalist party yeah Hindu nationalist yeah
that's much more right-wing and so forth and you know Modi had a very checkered background before
he became a leader of the country he was actually prohibited from entering the United States for
some time due to his involvement in human rights abuses and the massacres and riots took place in
India in the state when she was governor uh some years before but now he's prime minister and he is
certainly changing India in many many ways and one way we're seeing is a Crackdown on minorities and
the liberal Civil Society groups crackdowns and consolidations of the press so India
is democracy which existed for about 70 years it's certainly degrading and becoming something
quite different and you're seeing a lot of outline about this from international human
rights groups the press and so forth and you know I would say in perspective of a social
media company that you know if the ostensible goal or ostensible reason for purchasing of
Twitter by Elon musk's part was to further a liberal ideal like free speech you certainly
need to resist a bit the attempts by authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian governments to crush that
and instead we're seeing unfortunately Twitter acting more and more as a handmaiden to the
Indian government in the trajectory and which is going at the moment and uh the trajectory is yes
censorship as well but censorship that aids um Modis essentially political discrimination
and Crackdown of Rights for minority groups particularly Muslim citizens uh in within
India I mean 200 million Muslims live in India but they are still a minority and are actively being
um discriminated against I mean Modi has used this tactic many times right I think
most notoriously recently in Kashmir where he was immensely aggressive in censorship uh shutting off
the the the the the internet for a long period of time and that's obviously a majority Muslim State
um how how much of this is uh instrumental or foundational for modi's politics and his rule over
India censorship as a tool to maintain the power of the the groups that uh of the majority that
that he's kind of representing here uh one thing people usually don't know is that India actually
leads the world in Internet shutdowns of this type which you're referring to which took place
in Kashmir and most of it a lot of it has been targeted as you said against Indian Muslims who
are very very large minority but still a minority in India you know 200 250 million people like that
but lately and what we saw last week is that this shutdown actually targeted a different province
which was not Muslim majority it's actually a Sikh majority Province or plurality uh Punjab
and Punjab is was a site of a separatist movement in the 1980s uh it was an Insurgency at that time
in Punjab and there are some dissatisfaction or unhappiness among many Sikh punjabis with the
Indian government for various reasons to this day there's a gentleman whom the Indian government is
trying to detain he's a popular Sikh preacher and the response was to shut down the internet in this
province during that time I think about 27 million people live there by Indian standards it's a small
Province but you know by global standards pretty big number of people it's almost a population of
the entire country like Canada so you know the internet was shut down people were not able to
do SMS Communications many many other things all the catch one guy occessively and then during this
time a lot of the global social media accounts commenting on the subject were withheld in India
at the request of Indian government to Twitter so what you saw unfortunately was a shutdown of
people's ability to communicate with friends and family to operate normally in an entire gigantic
Province full of people and you know all in the sense of all you know cracking down on you could
call free speech and maybe you don't like his speech of getting accused of being separatists
or something like that this gentleman we're trying to catch but you know if a company
has a commitment to free speech and the brave thing that means it means including all types of
political speech including political speech which certain governments where you operate don't like
so you know I think that this is part and parcel of the change in Indian government and if you're
operating there as a company you need to be ready to draw a line with what you're morally standing
for or not I think there's been a lot of pressure on companies operating in China in the last couple
years for reasons which are understandable and somewhat comparable to India but now the
questions not only being asked in India at the moment even though we're seeing uh some
evidence of crackdowns which are on the Spectrum which you may see in more authoritarian countries
um what is particularly going on in pujab uh Punjab right now that
um is it is it just the the search for uh this kind of nationalist leader or
um or whether some of the political realities on the ground that they're also trying to Tamp down
yeah so as I alluded to earlier in the 1980s there was a major Insurgency in Punjab by thick
separatist groups who wanted to create a separate country called khaledan out of India so you know
obviously many people know India used to be one much bigger country and Pakistan was part
of that and Bangladesh is part of that and there was the separation happened when the British left
on religious grounds so Hindus and Muslims sort of got separate states to something Illuminating
in Muslim still in India now feeks were left out of that and they always wanted to have a separate
State and many of them want to have a separate state in without Punjab and when they tried to
do that in the 80s and they did it by taking up arms many of them the government responded very
violently they were a terrible Crackdown there was a attack and bombing of their holy sites and
so forth and their pilgrims in other parts of India against Sikh Indians uh because of these
events and because of a later assassination of Indian Prime Minister buyers Sikh bodyguards it
was a big terrible situation took place the Indian government put it down very forcefully they don't
want to see anything like that happen again and Most states you kind of understandably they're
very uh you can be very authoritarian towards perceived threats to the sovereignty or the
territorial integrity and we certainly saw that in India in the 80s and because they're so afraid of
that happening again too they're quite aggressive against any expression of ostensible or possible
separatism among speaks today in Punjab they've tried to co-op certain seeks that they can into
the Indian government military those who are not reconcilable or those who were quite committed to
a separate's Homeland or those who feel oppressed or discriminated against by Indian government with
their minorities they're considered enemies so now we stand such a movement exists today
and you see it events in this gentleman his name is amrapal Singh who's still on the Run
uh and so supporters who still are also on the run in Punjab it's an Evidence of the Indian
government's continue fear and paranoia about the subject and your states often overreact uh
to the threats like this the other over overreact sometimes with brutality and you certainly want to
not encourage that and you don't want to enable that uh when it seems to be taking place yes and
um I know I'll return to the Twitter angle um in a second I just I'm trying to understand the full
scope of this how much of this also has to do with some of the protests by Farmers groups because of
um what Modi has been doing in his time in power which is like attempting to deregulate
and privatize these sectors so you could think of the Indian government the BJP governments are very
new liberal government in a way it's neoliberal economically uh it's approach to Identity you
could say is also neoliberal in many ways so it's India is the country which is built in 70 years it
had like a socialist sort of founding and because of that there's a big sediment of subsidies and
you know allotments which were kind of set up to keep the various many many diverse groups of
India satisfied in certain ways one could argue that not all these are efficient and maybe some
in the interest of neoliberalism they should be removed I think there are many people in the Indie
government who have which have that view and but you know it's been an antagonize people when you
do that and secondly there's also a perception of crony capitalism on Bianca moldy and people
around him so in the two years ago they were in Punjab there were big there's a big protest
movement uh it was about water rights and you know dissemination of water between Punjab and haryana
and people you know there's one on strike they took up the roads and so forth and they actually
didn't succeed in getting concessions out of the Indian government importantly because many people
in Punjab are relatively well off the land owners and so forth they have some political thought
as a result of that so the Indian government did concede but I think that it was alarming to them
in some ways because it was still an expression of political power and assertiveness on the
part people in a part of the country who have a history of many of them have history of having
some desire for their own Homeland so I think it made them nervous and they're certainly not
going to tolerate or they'll be on guarding these further expressions of political a certain job
um and I think we're seeing that today so you know I think they concede with the farmer's
protest but they didn't like it they didn't like to concede they don't like seeing that and
I think in India too uh generally speaking the provinces which are minority majority minority
they tend to experience more if not hostility from the government at the very least suspicion
and that's just you can often translate into kind of harsh measures in response