Captain Amrinder Singh, 79, Chief Minister of Punjab, India, had emotionally told voters while campaigning in 2017 that this would be the last election he would fight.
Less than a year before the state elections (to be held in early 2022), Singh has rescinded his retirement plans. The Congress party now faces a Navjot Singh Sidhu-sized problem.
The colourful former cricket player, Sidhu, 57, has rebelled against Singh because he is impatient to be Singh’s successor in Punjab.
The Congress High Command, with its considerably weakened political capital, can’t afford to alienate Singh, its tallest leader in Punjab and one of the few mass leaders it has nor can it snub Sidhu with his rocketing political ambitions.
Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, has 68.6 million followers on Twitter. An early and brilliant adopter of social media, he effectively harnessed its potential to spread his brand.
So when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government recently sent Delhi Police on a raid to the Twitter offices in Delhi and Gurugram (the offices were empty due to lockdown), the action seemed to have come a full circle on the relationship between India’s ruling party and social media.
Is it a free-speech issue as pitched by a defiant Twitter or is it a compliance issue of Big Technology as flagged by the Government of India (GOI)? In its slugfest with Twitter, GOI shot back, saying it did not need lessons as the largest democracy in the world from a for-profit big tech firm.
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