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“Lawfully passed orders are binding on any business entity. They must be obeyed immediately,” Information Technology Secretary Ajay Prakash Sawhney told senior management of Twitter Inc. in a scheduled meeting that took place at Twitter’s request on Wednesday. In an unprecedented development, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued a press statement about the meeting with Twitter’s Vice President of Global Public Policy Monique Meche and Deputy General Counsel and Vice President Legal Jim Baker. Read MeitY’s press statement here From the statement, it is clear that Sawhney spent much of his time reminding Twitter executives that while Twitter is free to formulate its own rules and guidelines, as a business entity working in India, the social media platform must follow Indian laws irrespective of its own rules and guidelines. The meeting occurred after Twitter had released a statement at 10 am IST on February 10, wherein the social media platform said that it had restored access to some content that was temporarily taken down on February 1, “in a manner that we believe was consistent with Indian law”. While refusing to take action on accounts of news media entities, journalists, and activists, and politicians, Twitter had stated, “[W]e do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law, and, in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression.” In a tweet, MeitY had called this statement, published as a blog post, “unusual”. ‘Hashtag in question was incendiary in nature,’ says MeitY Referring to ‘#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide’, Sawhney “expressed strong displeasure” about Twitter’s actions after it received an emergency Section 69A blocking order to remove the hashtag. The order had been sent to Twitter on January 31, but Twitter acted on it only on February 1. Sawhney said that if these orders are “executed days later”, they “become meaningless”. He said that “Twitter has unwillingly, grudgingly and with great delay complied with the substantial parts of the order”. The statement called the hashtag “incendiary” and “baseless”, and said that it was used to spread misinformation. It said that such actions are “neither journalistic freedom nor freedom of expression as envisaged under Article 19 of the Constitution of India”. Twitter refused to comment on the press statement and directed Forbes India to its February 10 blog post. ‘Differential treatment of Twitter to incidents at Capitol Hill, Red Fort,’ says IT Secretary