In the Modi for Takedowns

Mike, we're going to start with a story that I think has been kind of rumbling for years, really.

The latest episode has taken off in the last few months, and that is India's relationship as a country with big tech platforms.

And we've seen a series of interesting kind of milestones in relation to this story over the last few months.

And I wanted to kind of map out that story today in this episode, because I think a lot of people would have either seen aspects of it and not really seen how it all fits together or just perhaps had that pass them by.

So I want to kind of map out what that looks like.

And it has a lot of implications for how big tech works in India and also with countries of a certain kind of authoritarian nature, let's say.

Yeah.

So we're going to start with a story that we touched on briefly on controlled speech a couple of months back, which was a test, an exam that more than 2 million people sat in India called the NEED test.

And this is a national eligibility come entrance test, which many, many young people take with the idea of becoming medical professionals and doctors.

It's a big, big deal for a lot of people in India.

A lot of people save up money in order to do it.

It's quite expensive for a lot of the country, and it's viewed as a kind of gateway to a more prosperous future.

So people study for it for ages, and it's a massive deal.

This year, not for the first time, but there was some controversy around it because after the test was taken on May the 3rd, the results of that were cancelled because the government found that there'd been exam test leaks.

And people were able to get the paper in advance, which led to huge anger, as you can expect.

And to make matters worse, the government actually banned Telegram, which is widely used in India and was one of the reasons why the exam was leaked for a week in the lead up to the retake.

So you had anger about the exam being retaken.

And then you had anger about the fact that Telegram was essentially banned for a week, not only for the students taking exams, but for everyone in the country.

many of whom are kind of small business owners using Telegram to go about their work.

So you have lots of disaffected youth at this point, people who are angry with the government, particularly the education department, and they kind of rally online under the guise of the Cockroach Janter Party.

So this is a kind of parody in terms of name on the ruling BJP party and takes the name, the kind of cockroach party, it takes the name from a comment by the chief justice officer who compared young people in India who were going into journalism and activism as cockroaches.

So this youth movement kind of takes that comment and builds a kind of movement around it that not only depicts Modi in less than favourable ways online, but then starts to gather in cities across India, the most notable of which was a big protest in New Delhi, actually when we were in Truscon on the 20th of July.

So you might have seen stories around that time.

That's all kind of well and good.

There's a bit of a problem for the Indian government to face at that point.