Digital Didi Changing Mindsets, Practices and Narratives
This week, news outlets and social media across the world is covering the protests in France, and rightly so. Without delving into the nuances, France is seeing protests that have also been turning violent, after the police had been accused of murdering a teenager by shooting.
While recent reports suggest France is in for a relatively calmer night after the protests, parallelly in our country, many parts of the state of Manipur has also been witnessing violence – for over three months now. The government had resorted to calling in the central forces but their indiscriminate shoot-to-kill action has increased deaths but provided no viable solution to the conflict. In fact, almost twenty years after Manipur’s Meira Paibis, the women torchbearers or the mothers of Manipur had staged a protest with a photo that no one would easily wipe of other consciences, Manipuri women have again demanded peace in the state.
The ethnic conflict is complicated to explain – but compiling from several sources, it runs deep, and it runs back at least as old as the British Raj, when the colonisers intervened in the existing system to divide the communities. Below is a quote from the Caravan’s commentary on the issue. Just like everyone else, we urge the government to intervene responsibly and resolve the conflict without more damage to life, property and rights of the communities – but from our end, we have to flag and highlight some of the violations of basic rights. Internet shutdowns work exactly opposite to this cause- because it restricts freedoms, economic and political. This is a direct result of linking services that are as basic as food distribution and unemployment benefits to the internet- which is deadly when combined with lack of access. And in these cases, this access block is intentionally done, in an area that is already reeling from conflict, displacement, and resulting poverty and hunger.
Moreover, they prevent people from accessing information and communicating with each other, which can make it difficult to resolve conflicts peacefully. It violates these fundamental rights of freedom of expression – and of journalists trying to report violations, basically amounting to censorship of people and the press. This is exacerbated by the fact that most Indians rely on mobile connectivity for any internet access: “Most shutdowns involve only cutting off access to the internet on mobile phones. But this translates into a near-total internet blackout in that region because 96 percent of subscribers in India use their mobile devices to access the internet, while only 4 percent have access to fixed line internet.”
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