Wrong signals

Wrong signals

Instead of summoning global CEOs to India we should be wooing them to India.

The summons to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear before the parliamentary standing committee on information technology dents government’s efforts to improve India’s ease of doing business. Summoning a top business leader like Dorsey all the way from the US, to respond to frivolous complaints initially levelled by an unknown right wing group calling itself Youth for Social Media Democracy, sends out all the wrong signals about India. The group wrote to committee chairman Anurag Thakur, a BJP leader, alleging bias in suspension of right wing Twitter accounts. The summons is an outcome. It is also a dead giveaway that India’s current hyper-politicised atmosphere is interfering in business.

Acting tough on a foreign company may feed election-eve nationalist frenzy but the repercussions may manifest in areas beyond Thakur’s narrow ambit. There is, for example, the constant US refrain that India places too many entry barriers for market access to US companies. Given President Donald Trump’s tariff-happy ways such needling of US companies is best avoided, particularly, at this time.

Authorities often threaten to hold social media companies to account for user posts numbering in millions daily, which is akin to punishing telecom companies for a crime hatched during a phone call. However, after blaming social media companies for inaction the grouse against them now seems to be that they are taking action. Thakur should note that social media platforms may just be acting more stringently owing to government’s draconian threats to shut down platforms on which fake news or unlawful content is posted. None of this is to say that Parliament cannot summon Dorsey or a Mark Zuckerberg as US Senate did. But that happened only after significant evidence of serious privacy violations and Russian meddling in US polls surfaced.

Government’s tendency towards regulatory overreach is spurred by too many laws, vaguely defined executive powers and weak institutions that lend themselves to harassing individuals. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done excellent work in wooing foreign investment. But all that could be nullified by an excess of nationalist frenzy and regulatory zeal at home – even as less attention is paid to pressing problems such as agrarian distress or the jobs crisis (themselves outcomes of overregulation to some extent). The government must nudge Thakur into letting go. By working up an avoidable pseudo-nationalist lather the IT committee is also working, precisely, against the national interest.