Many science historians attribute ‘
what goes up must come down’ to Isaac Newton, and this must be running in the minds of the protagonists whose WhatsApp conversations got leaked recently. The conversations revealed India’s new norms in creating
influence rents (as some management scholars like Gautam Ahuja and Sai Yayavaram term it in their research). It also gives you a glimpse of how government affairs in today’s India are managed by corporate professionals evoking Old India’s Niira Radia tapes.
These leaks also come in 2021, just when a global data privacy policy shift of WhatsApp saw millions in India alone switch to Telegram and Signal, forcing WhatsApp to stall the shift for the time being. It also displayed that as potential ‘information autocracies’ flourish and perpetuate, boundary conditions emerge as leaks, ultimately reaffirming the Newtonian hypotheses.