Gujarat CM Modi: Did he say Cyber War?
By Bala Shah

Depending on your perspective, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is a Saintly hero blessed with the Midas touch or a Hindu strongman with a bias against minorities.  What is not disputed is that Mr. Modi understands business and has brought unprecedented economic success to his State.  Like all the hard men of politics, he is often misquoted or quoted out of context.

Gujarat supremo Mr. Modi understands technology like few of his peers.  He has two laptops and profiles in all the social networking sites.  His staff and admirers podcast and manager a Twitter account in his name.

Recently, he held a meeting with fans, techies and bloggers from Gujarat to bounce ideas on how to fine tune his message in Cyberspace.  Even though most of the media were not invited, some did publish reports about this meeting quoting anon sources.

A national newspaper ran an article titled ‘With fans' support, Modi chalks out cyber war’ on April 4, 2009 that read:

“
In 2004, if you did a Google search on Narendra Modi, the first 10 results would be articles written on 2002 Gujarat riots and links of his hate communities. Today, the first 20 pages have links to his personal websites and blogs created by his fans. All the result of an aggressive e-campaign for a makeover of his virtual identity which has made him immensely popular among Indian expats the world over. On Thursday, he prepared for another blitzkrieg in cyber space with a 40-minute closed-door meeting with members of his fan community and people who host his websites, trying to devise new ways to swamp the web. He seemed more concerned about his virtual security than his personal security and asked a lot of questions about rampaging Chinese hackers. Sources said Modi elicited ideas on how the world could be made aware about the changing environment in Gujarat through mass mailing, blogging and video content
“

The only problem was while the article was based on many facts; some of it was not true.

Blogger Jaydip Parkikh who was present at the meeting with Mr. Modi wrote a blog post titled ‘My Meeting with Narendra Modi’ on April 5, 2009 which read:

“
Today I was reading Times of India:  ‘With fans’ support, Modi chalks out cyber war’ and got shocked in Morning that how come they know about meeting? Anyways I want to confess that many things, which are mentioned in that news, are totally wrong. The meeting is not at all about Cyber wars. I think some one had misled Times reporters as we hadn’t discuss single word about Chinese Hackers or Mass mailing.  You can read detailed reporting in Gujarati on Desh Gujarat Blog.
“

As you can see quite often the media (including techgoss) can get a few things wrong.  Mr. Modi has followers who will do anything for him and critics who will hound him to the end of this earth.  In such a context, any piece of news will find an audience.

(Techgoss had published the following article on Feb 2, 2009)

Boycott of Tata, Airtel and Reliance fizzles
By Bala Shah

Depending on your perspective, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is a Saintly hero blessed with the Midas touch or a Hindu strongman with a bias against minorities.  What is not disputed is that Mr. Modi understands business and has brought unprecedented economic success to his State. A call by one of his critics to boycott 3 telecom companies has had mixed success.

Many of Mr. Modi’s supporters feel that he is Prime Ministerial material.  Super successful Industry heavy weights like Sunil Mittal (Airtel), Anil Ambani (Reliance) and Ratan Tata (Tata Indicomm) have publicly embraced him with two of them even suggesting he would make a good Prime Minister.  All three billionaire business tycoons own telecom companies in India and have many other non-telecom business interests as well

Bangalore-based documentary producer Ranjan Kamath is a Modi critic and not too happy at such respected business figures backing Modi.  Mr. Kamath started an online petition against Mr. Modi and the 3 telecom tycoons which requested anyone who did not agree with Mr. Modi’s policies to switch off their mobile phones and internet broadband connections for one day on Jan 30, 2009. (For some reason the petition says broadband and not dial up connections. Also, nothing about the fixed phones at home).  The idea was to use economic pressure on these business leaders to stop publicly supporting Mr. Modi.

Tata Sons threatened legal action as their big boss Ratan Tata had publicly physically embraced Mr. Modi but never “endorsed his becoming Prime Minister”.  In view of the legal threat, petition originator Mr. Ranjan Kamath changed the wording to make it clear that Mr. Tata did not publicly say he wanted Mr. Modi to be the Prime Minister.

While this public petition may have galvanized 4900 people on the internet and some actually switching off their mobile phones and broadband connections, it has failed to mobilize the general public in a big way.  While a number of high profile dancers, film producers and writers signed the petition, other hesitated because politicians and business houses make formidable enemies in India.

Jan 30th came and went.  By all accounts there was no mass boycott of these telecom companies.

Will there be another similar petition against telecom companies?  Will it have more success? Is it a good idea to switch off your mobile so that even close family and friends cannot contact you in case of an emergency?  Would it have been better if the boycott call asked not to buy new products on that day rather than switching off existing equipment? Only time will tell if such boycotts of telecom products make a difference.