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How Undercover Reporters Caught ‘Team Jorge’ & What This Means for India https://www.thequint.com/amp/story/explainers/undercover-reporters-caught-team-jorge-disinformation-elections-india-cambridge-analytica#read-more Team Jorge is said to have interfered with more than 30 elections around the world. SMITHA TK  18 Feb 2023

The secretly recorded six hours of meetings revealed he offered services such as open source intelligence (OSINT), cybersecurity, special operations, intelligence, and hacking activities, including extracting sensitive documents by exploiting vulnerabilities in the global signalling system that are available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns, and private companies interested in secretly manipulating the elections or framing public opinion, reported The Guardian.

A key tool used by Team Jorge is AIMS (Advanced Impact Media Solutions), a sophisticated software package that controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, and can be used to spread disinformation. Each avatar is given a multifaceted digital backstory and made to mimic human behaviour. Hanan claimed that AIMS bots were linked to SMS-verified phone numbers, some had credit cards; some had a role to play in a dispute in California over nuclear power, a MeToo controversy in Canada, a campaign in France involving a Qatari UN official named Roger Noriega, who served under George Bush, and was even used to discredit the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

DATA OF INDIANS COMPROMISED?
While The Guardian report has not revealed the details of the group's operations in India, a purported video showed that the Israeli group’s cyber tools were used in India too. The opposition Congress party on Thursday, drew parallels between the modus operandi of the Israel-based firm and the IT cell of the BJP.

The Congress demanded a probe into the alleged interference in Indian elections and asked the ruling party to respond to the exposé. Congress leader Supriya Shrinate said "If the government is not doing anything on this, it means it is seeking help to interfere in the country's democracy and elections. The data of Indians is being compromised by handing it over to a foreign firm."

India’s initiative to study the global benchmarks for water trading indicates that the NITI Aayog, as a national body of planning, has decided to continue with its neoliberalist stand and strengthen it further. 

If this comes into effect, though it is a national resource, water will be sold like gold and silver. As NITI Aayog Looks into Water Trading, it Should Know the High Costs it May Bring (thewire.in) 

Since the idea is directly concerned with property rights, the foremost challenge is how the legitimisation of monopolisation and exploitation of water and water resources will be justified in prevailing constitutional settings. How will the principles of equality and rights over water as a property be defined for water markets? Once water becomes a commodity for trade, a disturbing question will be what can be a ‘comfortable’ price of water for the poor and middle classes.

For a country like India, this idea also presents a challenge to equity. Instead of fighting for water for all, it encourages more water to the price payers. 

As the purpose of trade is to increase private surplus value, the worry is how the government will control the exploitation of groundwater. The NITI Aayog cannot afford to avoid the fact that big farmers and industrialists can collect excess amounts of water by investing in water trading. To ensure more water, they can establish water plants in plain lands and extract groundwater excessively by using advanced technology, as Nestlé is currently doing.

by Deepti Acharya

17/02/2023

Responding to a question by Communist Party of India MP K. Subbarayan in Lok Sabha on February 13, 2023, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that the Indian Council of Historical Research, a body under the Union education ministry, has not taken up any project to rewrite history and it is only working on filling the “gaps” in history.

How the ICHR Is 'Inventing History' Under the Modi Government (thewire.in)

In response, Congress MP Manish Tiwari pointed out in a supplementary question that Pradhan’s claim was in contradiction to the statements made by the council which is continuously and publicly boasting of ‘rewriting history’.

Professor Harbans Mukhia is an Indian historian who taught for a long time at the Jawaharlal Nehru University until his retirement in 2004. His work focuses on medieval India and he has written several books on Indian history and the medieval period.

When asked about the exhibition and the statement of the member secretary of the ICHR, Mukhia said, “They are taking us back to where James Mills left us in 1818…”

“Historiography has always been changing, but what is happening now is completely different. In the years succeeding 1947, history penned before independence was ‘decolonised’. Now, it is being ‘recolonised’ but they have no axis. To be honest, even graduation students do not talk of rulers as being Hindus or Muslims,” Mukhia said.

by Meenakshi Tewari

18/02/2023