The farmers protest has now gained global traction, right after international pop star Rihanna tweeted about it. It was soon joined by Greta Thunberg, a climate activist and Meena Harris, niece of US Vice President Kamala Harris, and many other global leaders supported the farmers.
Farmers are protesting against three controversial farm laws, for around 70 days till now.
No conclusive solution has been met between the government and the farmers as of now. Restrictions such as internet shutdown, stoppage of water tankers, etc. are being imposed at the protest sites.
No sooner did the global leaders took the human rights violations to Twitter, than the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) released a statement that they shouldn’t interfere in India’s internal matters. The government also claimed that a false propaganda is being created at an international level with the help of these global leaders.
Several Bollywood personalities and Indian sportspersons started backing the government’s statement to stay against such propagandas. Some tweets looked identical to one another.
What exactly had happened?
A document became a talking point after the Teen Climate Activist, Greta Thunberg shared a link to a toolkit on Wednesday. It was deleted, to be followed by an updated link on Thursday. Greta stated in her tweet that the previous toolkit was outdated and thus she updated it with a new one.
What exactly is a toolkit?
A toolkit is a document with links for petitions, information sources, action plans and guidelines for a planned event / campaign.
Toolkits are key to organizing digital campaigns, especially international, and they can be found to be in use by almost all grassroot movements.
In recent times, they could be seen in use for the Black Lives Matter, Hong Kong and anti-CAA protests and the intent is to keep all digital resources such as links, and information accessible to everyone via one document.
Attaching both the documents shared by Greta Thunberg for your references.
What’s the current scenario?
With the first deleted toolkit gaining traction, Delhi Police has filed an FIR against an unknown person to find out the authors of the document.
Delhi Police has also written a letter to Google and social media giants to provide the information of the toolkit from the first tweet. One popular Indian news outlet termed the toolkit as a “malicious global call-to-action against the country”.
The police claim the creators’ intent appeared to “create disharmony among various social, religious and cultural groups and encourage disaffection and ill-will against the Government of India.”
And according to the initial probe of Delhi Police, Mo Dhaliwal, a Canadian-born Sikh, co-founder of Poetic Justice Foundation has also come under the scanner. Police says the PJF supports the pro-Khalistani movements and they might have created this controversial toolkit which was later shared by Greta.
Apart from that, few societal issues are going unnoticed…
One worrying outcome of this is slut-shaming, wherein women voicing upon the farmers’ protests are facing abuses and threats.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been labelled with several tags, Mia Khalifa, a former pornographic actress had abusive tweets bringing up her former profession and Chris Brown is being praised by some for assaulting Rihanna in 2009.
Instances where posters of Greta Thunberg’s and Rihanna’s images were burned, have also been reported.
The protests have been routinely termed as by Indian celebrities and authorities as “internal”, despite being capable of having a global impact environmentally as lowered regulations have almost always encouraged unsustainable practices and inequality.
The recent developments, if anything, have diverted the attention away from farmers’ protests on-ground to twitter debates and unsubstantial comments.
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