I seek your attention readers.
Only your unflinching attention could save us, our future and decide if our children would suffer the same fate, held hostage as we have been by the Empire and its stooges.
We become hostages when somebody else decides what we ought to see and read. And this is media, the essential stooge of the Empire, which gift wraps lies as pills for our own good; for our freedom, for the good of humanity.
A sample of it was served in Indian Express yesterday, where a feted academician Bhaskar Chakravorti has written an OpEd, in naked hostility to India’s tacit support to Russia on Ukraine (a line towed by the newspaper), and that the Modi government is looking for alternative to the Big Tech against its’ “weaponisation” to the cause of the Empire.
So let’s examine the wanton lies Indian Express-Bhaskar Chakravorti combine have served—two Indian entities against the very soil which has given them lives.
India Is Standing On Wrong Side Of History
This is what Chakravorti parrots, the lines echoed by the Washington on India’s neutrality on Ukraine.
He is aghast at the fate of “innocent” Ukrainians, its millions of refugees, Mariupol, and how Putin has spun a narrative about the “genocide against the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.” And that Putin has managed it by “taking the independent media off the air.”
Would Chakravorti also find the United Nations to have spun a narrative of “genocide against the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine” through its unanimous Resolution 2202, admitting of 5,000 such people killed, 1.5 million displaced, seeking refuge in Russian territory etc. And this was in 2015!
Did Chakravorti really believe that readers won’t google Mariupol and find out that its stranglehold of neo-Nazis who go by the name of Azov Battalion and are indeed incorporated in the Ukrainian army?
Did he really believe that readers don’t know Putin took off “independent media” in retaliation to what the West imposed on its state-run media and how Big Tech throttled any view emanating from Moscow?
For records, Russia began banning the big tech on March 21. The one done by the Big Tech—your Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft—happened a good three weeks earlier, on March 1!
As for your “wrong side of history” Mr Chakravorti, what sort of right side it is that the Empire unilaterally intervenes in Greece, Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti, Chile etc in the past and Libya, Yemen, Iraq etc in our times?
Why, the United States which still has boots in a sovereign Syria is not on the wrong side of history? Why those millions fleeing from the torched Middle East are not innocents?
And what kind of right history it is when you ignore the resolution of the global community in the United Nations (76/61), to go with Human Rights Council resolution (46/5), which condemned and demanded the abolition of unilateral coercive measures?
Why it is not on the wrong side of history when the Empire ignores the truth that only UN sanctions, imposed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, are legal?
Why is it not wrong side of history when the Empire’s unilateral sanctions drive hundreds of millions of Russians and Iranians and others to doom? How is it right to wipe out millions when your enemy is a government?
Are they not innocents?
No humanitarian concerns here?
“Weaponisation” of Big Tech
Chakravorti is hostile to minister of state for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar mentioning the “weaponisation” of digital platforms by the Big Tech.
How is it not a “weaponisation” Mr Chakravorti when Ukraine directly appealed to Big Tech companies in the same way it sought assistance from the EU, NATO and the US government?
Isn’t it a reminder that these Big Tech giants, in our world, are major players in the geopolitical arena?
And when these Big Tech companies de-platform a sitting US president; and stop us readers from knowing the side of Moscow; how is it upholding freedom and neutrality of internet?
Why would you grudge the Modi government which openly saw the sides Big Tech took when India was being vilified during the Covid-19 and Protesting Farmers crisis? When today we all know India has been mightily successful in the pandemic and that farmers’ was a staged protest?
Why should the Indian government not crackdown on Khalistanis, terrorists and other secessionist who ride on the leeway given on its platform by the Big Techs?
Chakravorti thinks that Chandrashekhar is “touting” a pet project of “atmanirbhar internet”, a parallel internet along the lines of China, North Korea, Russia which are “digital outcasts.”
Leave aside the contempt Chakravorti betrays he has for “outcasts”, who would deny that the history of US is replete with muzzling the voices it doesn’t like.
Besides asking News Channels to black out the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of dissident Harold Pinter in 2005, to the most recent fate of journalist Julian Assange which doesn’t prick the conscience of Liberal world what evidence do we need that the Empire could muzzle anyone which doesn’t toe its agenda like India presently is not doing on Russia-in-Ukraine?
Why India shouldn’t work around an eventuality of a SWIFT-less world? (Trust me, every second country is today looking at its alternative.)
What’s wrong if India is creating a new cyber-security and data governance framework?
Or if Chandrashekhar is “disturbed” that these Big Techs have become “gatekeepers” and violate the basic principle of neutrality and openness of Net?
That their move is a “troubling precedent”?
Why Indians shouldn’t pay heed to Chandrasekhar’s words that the Big Tech “platforms are now controlling the access to the internet in many ways, be it through monopolies of search engines, dipoles of app stores or devices? (Read Chandrashekhar’s views here).
Why should we ignore the track record of Chandrashekhar who was instrumental in Supreme Court striking down the notorious Sec 66A of IT Act in 2015 which could jail a person for three years for posting “offensive” content online? And it all stemmed out of his conviction for the Net neutrality.
Since the Second World War, the Empire has manipulated the world while masquerading as a force for universal good.
It promised Russia it won’t expand NATO into Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union imploded; yet after Hungary, Poland, Romania etc, is hell-bent on including Ukraine.
All it takes to end this crisis is for Ukraine to remain neutral. Is it too much to task if your concern truly is “innocent Ukrainians”?
It signed agreements on “indivisible security” of Euro-Atlantic nations yet flouted; the US pulled out of INF Treaty without as much as a thank you etc etc.
So, most of the world has ignored West’s call for sanctions on Russia, yet we the readers ought to choose your side of history Mr Chakravorti.
Smell the coffee, man.
