Just before the shape-shifting US mid-term election results came in, there was an intriguing report about how New Delhi had hired a lobbyist firm, Mercury Public Affairs, in April and how it had managed to get US President Trump to congratulate Prime Minister Modi in one of his Truth Social posts for becoming India’s longest serving prime minister (‘Firm Hired at $75,000 Per Month Fee Organised Trump’s Truth Social Post on Modi’s Continuous Years in Office’, The Wire, November 7). What the story revealed was the premium Narendra Modi placed on being publicly recognised by the US president even at a cost of hiring a public relations outfit at an exorbitant $75,000 per month and being mentioned by him in a Truth Social post must have been for him the very heaven. It also indicated that like all things Trumpian, access to Truth Social could be of a transactional nature.It was Modi who got to social media first. He discovered that the only way to shut down the intrusive questioning of mainstream media in post-riot Gujarat was to tame the mainstream through various stratagems, including cultivating and rewarding their owners, but more important, by adopting methods of non-discursive communication with potential electors. As I noted in my 2019 book, Media’s Shifting Terrain, while discursive communication through mainstream media is necessarily open to engagement and rational argumentation, one-way non-discursive communication draws on a range of social interactions and communication tools and is much more open to control. As a communication theorist I quoted had written: “The prevalence of digital tools, as well as the importance of emotions to inventing and composing, both make it necessary to reiterate how language is much more than words. Language included non-discursive forms of meaning-making, forms that take advantage of image, emotion and nonsequentiality.” Long before world leaders had adopted to Twitter, Modi was posting tweets as early as 2009 through specially recruited hires. Trump too was in search of similarly non-discursive ways to connect to his audiences. He too used Twitter and Facebook toward this end, until he was suspended from both, as well as YouTube, after the insurrection of January 6, 2021, on the grounds that he would use these platforms to incite violence. Soon after this, Trump and his associates set up the Truth Social platform which became operational in early 2022. One of the differences in the style of the self-communication of the two men is that while Modi has a team working to a strictly set template who posts for him, Trump does his own tweeting even going on to leverage this by charging those who wish to have first access to the mind of the world’s most powerful man through payments ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 a month.But the commonalities in their tweets are striking, especially the self-obsession, egoistical energy, and narcissistic gaze that mark them. Modi has of course claimed to media interlocutors that he is non-biological, but in his posts on X he is careful to transfer all attributions of his own greatness to “I40 crore Indians”.Take this June’s post on X: “Deeply touched by the good wishes conveyed by people from all walks of life today and over the last few days. While I may not have been able to respond to each message individually, I cherish every greeting conveyed. I consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to serve Bharat and contribute to our nation’s development journey. Over the years, the people of India have repeatedly voted for stability, good governance and development. Their trust has been my greatest source of strength. I remain fully committed to working with even greater dedication to realise the vision of a Viksit Bharat and fulfil the aspirations of 140 crore Indians.”Trump, on his part, has put out on Truth Social an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, and when that proved too controversial he replaced it with another AI-generated clip of Jesus embracing him before a US flag. He has also put out infographics projecting himself as the greatest president of all time, way above his predecessors.When things go wrong both leaders transfer with consummate ease any blame to others. Trump never loses an opportunity to take potshots at his predecessor, “sleepy Joe”. For Modi, everything that misfires gets laid at the door of the Congress party: “If the Congress and its rotten ecosystem think their malicious lies can hide their misdeeds of several years, especially their insult towards Dr. Ambedkar, they are gravely mistaken! The people of India have seen time and again how one Party, led by one dynasty, has indulged in every possible dirty trick to obliterate the legacy of Dr. Ambedkar and humiliate the SC/ST communities.“Braggadocio is very much part of mix. The mid-term results must have been a body blow for Trump. When they started flowing in, it was reported that he shot out in a span of 13 minutes no less than 44 posts. But it did not take him long to recover his composure and he indicated this with a post: “America took a giant step back in History with the results of the last Election — Even the Stock Market, which has been a “ROCKETSHIP” under “TRUMP,” took a one day, 3 Trillion Dollar loss. But have no fear, we will be back, BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! President DONALD J. TRUMP”.Gloating comes easily to Modi as well. Take this recent tweet: “MLC elections in 28 seats across 4 big states – Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka. Elections held using ballot papers. Guess how many seats Congress won?” As for the use of invective, there is an interesting difference. Trump’s approach is more direct and unrestrained. In one Truth Social post earlier this year he tore into Congresswomen Ihan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, saying they “should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!” A subliminal racism can sometimes emerge in full view as when a video featuring Barak and Michelle Obama as dancing apes appeared on Truth Social. It was taken down but not before it remained on view for 12 hours. Modi, in contrast, is far more restrained while posting than he is while delivering election speeches. But there is a clever dodge here. While he himself is careful not to post any direct insults, he follows those who do. In her book, I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army, Chaturvedi termed these online trolls as “Modi’s yodhas” or warriors. A notorious instance of this was the tweet Gujarat businessman Nikhil Dadhich put out after revered journalist, Gauri Lankesh, was gunned down in her home in 2017: ‘A bitch died a dog’s death leading to all the puppies squealing in unison.” So outrageous was the tweet that the man had to hastily delete it and claim that it was not written with reference to Lankesh. From all accounts, Modi did not unfollow Dadhich.Two men, authoritarian populists by instinct and political practice, who have learnt to ace self-communication in real time to further their political ends. The question we should ask ourselves is where is this assemblage of disinformation, bombast, self-aggrandisement, cult-building and political power projection taking us?§The ‘take down’ tamashaTake down notices are being sprinkled on the fetid air like confetti. According to one source, in the five months between this March to July, some 195,000 take downs were sought – a process expedited through the Sahyog Portal set up by Amit Shah’s own ministry. Not only has the frequency of such action been enhanced, the time required to take down the material seen as being in “violation” of the rules has been shortened to a tenth of what it was earlier – a 36 hour-notice period has now been whittled down to three hours.Given this state of affairs the strange fate that recently visited internet transparency organisations, Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) and Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), should come as no surprise (‘’Takedown Notices to IFF, SFLC Came from an Imposter, Not Delhi Police’: X Tells Delhi High Court’, November 6).They were, it turns out, the victims of fake take down orders filed by a Srinagar-based juvenile, according to the Delhi Police. An account of the entire sequences of events was put out by IFF, and it goes like this:“On 29 October 2026, an email from a Proton Mail address reached IFF, @SFLCin and the operator of @geoblockedindia. It enclosed a “Legal Notice” said to be issued on behalf of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, calling on the three to stop publicly opposing Government directions under the IT Act, to stop documenting restricted content, and to confirm compliance within seven days. The notice named no advocate, carried no enrolment number and cited no provision of law. “We published it and our reply the next day. On 31 October, the same address wrote that it had “initiated legal action with the Delhi Police”. Fourteen minutes later, a report was submitted to X through its public online reporting form in the name of the Special Commissioner of Police (Crime), Delhi Police, describing our post of 30 October as defamatory towards the RSS under Section 356 of the BNS. A second report followed on 2 November, listing forty URLs. The second report asked X to withhold six of our posts, four of https://SFLC.in’s, eleven of @geoblockedindia’s, sixteen posts by users who had done no more than comment on the controversy, and the accounts @internetfreedom @SFLCin and @geoblockedindia in their entirety.“Neither the Delhi Police nor the Ministry of Home Affairs wrote to us. We learnt of the reports on 3 November, when X forwarded them to us in the interest of transparency. We published them the same day and, through Advocate Abhik Chimni, served a legal notice on the Special Commissioner of Police (Crime) calling for their withdrawal and for disclosure of the complaint and authority behind them. No reply came. “Because the reports invoked a three-hour window and X could have acted on them at any moment, we filed Internet Freedom Foundation v. Union of India, W.P.(C) 16671/2026, on 4 November, without waiting for the notice period to expire. @SFLCin filed its own petition against the same reports. Both were listed today in Court No. 256 of the Delhi High Court and heard together. “Our petition argued that defamation under Section 356 BNS is a non-cognizable offence that proceeds only on a complaint by the person aggrieved, before a Magistrate, and that a police officer cannot decide it through a web form. It also argued that a public reporting form is not a lawful intimation under Rule 3(1)(d), which requires a reasoned written order from an officer specially authorised by the appropriate Government. “Senior Advocate Akhil Sibal appeared for both IFF and @SFLCin. He placed on record the transparency reports published by X and the legal notice sent in the RSS’s name, and submitted that IFF had written to the RSS and received no response, and that @SFLCin email to the Delhi Police address given on the reports had bounced. Both petitioners, he submitted, were before the Court on an apprehension of action being taken against their X accounts. “X submitted that, on an internal investigation, the email from which the reports were submitted appears to be fake, that it has filed a complaint with the Delhi Police, and that it is not likely to take action on the reports at this stage. On Mr Sibal’s submission, the Court recorded X’s statement and disposed of both petitions in those terms, with liberty to the petitioners to approach the Court afresh if any action is taken.“The immediate threat to our account is gone. The question of who used a serving Special Commissioner’s name to seek the removal of three accounts that document censorship in India, and of sixteen unconnected users, remains with the Delhi Police, which now has X’s complaint before it…”What is clear from these unfortunate and unacceptable developments is that the “take down” mania of this government, with innumerable agencies being given the licence to flag content deemed “unlawful”, and even take action against online news portals and YouTubers, is leading to a free-for-all that is adding to a climate of fear swirling around us. Every take down is also a take down of one of the most important constitutional rights we, the people of India, enjoy: freedom of expression. §Readers Write In…Agniveer unleashedGeorge Ninan has a sardonic take on the Agniveer issue…When the Agniveer shenanigan had been steamrolled in, it did not require a great number of little grey cells to join the dots. After having been limited to: lathi-drill with six foot long quarterstaffs, subsequently, post 1947; some musketry training with single pellet air guns; and again subsequent to ask’nazi bromide well at least adulation, commando training callisthenics shakas aka dharmic krav’maga; finally jhandewalan-nagpur had access to weapons training — with real rifles, carbines, explosives, grenades, sniper or at least marksman training. Life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.A Frankenstein’s monster is coming to life — discharged Agniveers swelling the ranks of our Gen Z, coming in with some smattering of training in attacks, ambushes, aggressive defense, intrepid while confronting the enemy. One presumes basic training that is common to all arms and services includes more than left right left right, pajama dheela topi tight. At any rate this must have been the anxiety of our fauji-babu Chanakyas in their power-point presentations to netas. and the ‘for immediate action’ directive to keep the very large numbers of Agniveers, inexorably coming to the termination of their four-year contract with three out of four being sent away, for another two years emasculated under military law (‘Agnipath Partial Roll Back: Modi Govt Extends Term of Agniveers by 2 Years’, The Wire, November 4). Well at least until the present battle of Koregaon Part Two resolves itself. But will it? Seems we are meanwhile building up for a fourth battle of Panipat. Is it all doom and gloom? Not for our western India chambers of commerce, the Jagat Seths basking in their golden age of the Guptas. And this time round the mohurs have not been counted, bagged, sealed for safekeeping in Somnath’s coffers. For the usurers it is win-win always. Indeed they are the chosen people. §For the complete picture…In my last column which appeared on October 31, I carried a letter from Pooja Choksi on a piece she had authored along with Forrest Fleischman (‘Beyond Tree Planting, Why India’s Ecological Restoration Drives Need Revamping’, August 18) in which she expressed her dismay at the change in the order of authorship in the piece after it appeared in the Wire. In my response to it I had noted that since I was travelling in August and September, I had missed responding to it when it had reached the mail box. Since then, I have been informed by the editorial desk that the Wire did respond to Ms Choksi in a timely manner, corrected the authorship tangle, and that Ms Choksi herself had acknowledged this in a letter dated August 21 from which I quote:“Thank you for your prompt reply and for making the corrections. Ritvi also got in touch with me about the corrections I requested regarding the incorrectly placed links to research publications in the article. I appreciate your attention to this matter. “Please accept my apology for making assumptions about the reason for this mix up. I’ve never worked in a system that alphabetizes according to first name, so I hope you can understand my concern about the order being changed.” I am revisiting this closed chapter only to emphasise two points: One, that my vacation had led to confusion which could have been avoided if I had been more prompt in responding to readers’ mail; and two, most important, the Wire tries to pay attention to queries from readers and contributors.Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.