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What happens with a newly-elected Indian minister in the central government starts tweeting? Many hilarious controversies, clashes and headlines.
The dapper first-time parliamentarian with his ever-ready quips is Shashi Tharoor , India's Minister of State for External Affairs with a kick-ass resume. He's a former high-level United Nations diplomat, glib speaker, award-winning author and Stephen Colbert's "friend of the show," not to mention a New Yorker for several years with relatively ready access to international media. (We got his taste of his controversial side on this BlogHer post before his tweeting days.) He has a huge Twitter following, especially among the social media-savvy Indian youth back home and overseas, and including me since I started working on this post.
As the LA Times report points out, a tech-tuned politician is a rarity in party-based democracies, especially in a government and bureaucracy that still pushes files and agendas, and finds it disconcerting when people demand that official documents be disclosed for public scrutiny.
Tharoor's tweeting agony is old news and I have been rather underwhelmed by the minister's online "heroism." Now, I have nothing against the minister tweeting. In fact, his open challenge to the closed-door, loyalty-based political culture is indeed a breath of fresh air. He challenges the basic old-guard tenet that policy issues should not be discussed in public. Excuse me? Who are these policies meant for?
Discussion and transparency is key to building a modern democracy and Indians have taken to social media in a big way to unburden themselves, network and push for social action (remember the Pink Panties campaign?).
Why I can't think of Tharoor as the game changer in present India (less than 5 percent of the country is online) has more to do with what common folks like us expect from our leadership in a country where policy decisions need to be debated on a platform that is accessible to the majority of voters. Tharoor often chooses to remain silent in public after his Twitter controversies, and goes beyond 140 characters.
That is material for another post.
Tharoor is probably a trailblazer for future India, but there is another India that is fighting harder to challenge a basic tenet of our Constitution that we take for granted until it is put to the test- freedom of speech and expression, especially with the rise of social media.
Also shaking the roots of the old ways is transparency in governance that has just begun its journey with the not-so-old Right to Information Act. People are paying with their lives to protect its tenets and use it.
Reactions to Tharoor's tweets may be symptomatic of both these problems, but the real battle is basic, offline, and being fought by far less privileged Indians, and unlike Tharoor, with no personal mandate to uphold or fight for better laws.
The Indian Constitution, freedom of speech and social networking:
Even as Google found new glory in its stand against China's reported heavy-handed control of the Internet, it is doing a delicate dance in India, when it comes to its popular networking site, Orkut. It is this Wall Street Journal report that set me thinking (rethinking actually) if we truly appreciate the spirit of freedom of speech and expression. This kind of censorship by law is far more serious than Tharoor's tweets.
Consider a few of Google's Orkut experience (source WSJ):
In September, lawyers at Google Inc.'s New Delhi office got a tip from an Internet user about alarming content on the company's social networking site, Orkut. People had posted offensive comments about the chief minister of India's southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who had died just a few days earlier in a helicopter crash.
Google's response: It removed not just the material but also the entire user group that contained it, a person familiar with the matter says. The Internet giant feared the comments could heighten tensions at a time when thousands of mourners of the popular politician were emptying into the street.
[...] Google has learned to be wary of material that could ignite unrest, from incendiary comments about politicians such as Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi to user groups bashing revered historical or religious figures.
"In those gray areas it is really hard," says Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, who oversees the legal aspects of new Google product launches. "On the one hand, we believe very strongly in political speech and, on the other hand, in India they do riot and they blow
