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Last evening, India’s information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Twitter had locked his account for an hour for posting content in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright

Act of “the USA”. The action was “highly peculiar”, he declared, part of some “agenda” on the social media company’s part and a “gross violation of the Modi government’s new IT rules.

Although Twitter clarified that it was a routine practice to flag copyright infringements under the US law, the anchors in TV news channel studios took it upon themselves to outrage on the

minister’s behalf. Sudhir Chaudhary of _Zee News,_ on his nightly _DNA _show_,_ declared that Twitter’s action against Prashad was retaliation against the Narendra Modi government for

landing a blow to the company’s “ego” by pulling it up for not complying with the new IT rules. He said “big and foreign” companies such as Twitter were akin to the East India Company: they

come to this country on the pretext of doing business and then start “imposing their own rules”. Another _Zee News_ anchor Aman Chopra titled the Friday episode of his daily show, _Taal Thok

Ke, _“_Twitter ne hadd paar kar di_?”. Twitter crossed the line? “Will Twitter teach the law to the country’s law minister now?” the visibly agitated anchor demanded to know. “It has

definitely crossed the line today.” He termed the temporary locking of the minister’s account as “digital _dadagiri_”. If this wasn’t enough, he went on another show called _Desh Hit _to

call Twitter’s move an action “against 137 crore Indians”. Rubika Liyaquat of _ABP News_ denounced it as Twitter’s “hooliganism” and “dictatorship”. “Twitter will not abide by Indian rules

in India but will enforce American rules in the country,” the anchor said, calling it the company’s “highhandedness”. _Times Now _held two debates of about 40 minutes each to pull up

Twitter. On her _Newshour Agenda_ show, Padmaja Joshi asked whether Twitter “locking out” the Indian minister because of an American law meant the company’s power had gone to its head. She

wondered if the move was designed to “deliberately set up confrontation” after the company was_ named in an FIR_ apparently for not removing videos of an elderly Msulim man being assaulted

in Ghaziabad. Joshi’s senior colleague, Navika Kumar, declared on her primetime show that Twitter had a “death wish”, working as it was according to its own rules and laws.