Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar warned WhatsApp after the platform shared the wrong map of India in one of its tweets. The meta-owned platform shared details about its upcoming New Year live stream and uploaded a video that excluded the illegally Pakistan-occupied regions of Jammu and Kashmir, as well as some regions claimed by China.
“Dear WhatsApp – Please fix the map error in India as soon as possible (sic),” the minister warned the company while tagging WhatsApp in his tweet. “All platforms that do business in India and/or want to continue to do business in India must use correct cards (sic),” he continued.
After the minister’s warning about the wrong Indian map, WhatsApp deleted his tweet. This comes just three days after MoS Chandrasekhar warned video call company Zoom founder and chief executive officer Eric Yuan to use a correct Indian card. “You may want to make sure you are using the correct maps of the countries you do / plan to do business in @ericsyuan (sic),” he tweeted. Yuan also deleted his tweet soon after.
There have been several occasions when India’s distorted map has been shared online, mainly in the J&K region on the Pakistan side and in the Ladakh region near China. Another case surfaced in 2021, when Twitter shared a false map of territories illegally occupied by China and Pakistan on its careers page.
Earlier this October, Indian ed-tech platform Byju’s also got caught up in a controversy over its alleged study footage showing Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) as “Azad Kashmir” with “Aksai Chin” on the other side. This prompted the company to issue a statement claiming that the image circulating online was fake and not its material.
“This is not part of any material that we have distributed. Our curriculum and all materials produced are strictly aligned with multiple national level accreditation bodies and are created with the highest standards in mind. We will report this to the relevant authorities for further investigation and action,” reads the official statement. “All of our content is watermarked and moreover, the use of our logo is incorrect. We never use an underline under the logo,” it said. Political parties like the Telangana Rashtriya Samithi (TRS) and Congress have recently come under fire for false maps.
