Jacob Joseph Puthenparambil

If individuals within a key department of the Government of India are to be believed, the purloining of Khare’s car, mobile telephone and laptop six months ago was “not a random act of burglary, but a well-thought and executed plan” to get details of his personal emails, “that had been unmonitored till then”. According to these sources, the emails showed disillusionment with the higher leadership of the Congress, which (or so Khare was claimed to believe) “had been preventing the PM from setting things right” by getting rid of corrupt bureaucrats. Such changes “took place only after facing down (political) pressure to retain them”, and were often swiftly reversed.

Outrage has predictably followed Twitter’s announcement yesterday that it has developed a system to block (or, as the company euphemistically puts it, “withhold”) specific tweets in specific countries if they violate local law, while keeping the content available for the rest of the world. The hashtag #TwitterBlackout is bursting with calls for a boycott of the microblogging service on Saturday, and headlines like “Twitter caves to global censorship” abound.

Contrary to many of the headlines, the battle in Bani Walid, which the pro-revolutionary forces now seem to have decided in their favor, was not part of a pro-Gaddafi uprising. 

This year, I have to sadly report that it was as if India had vanished completely from the world’s radar screen. A much smaller contingent of Indian businessmen arrived than last year and an even smaller contingent of officials. Some high officials cancelled coming at the last minute possibly because they were relegated to unimportant sessions. So what has changed? Why has India once again begun to reek of those earlier times when India was not even a small cog in the economic machine of the world?