Shefali Vaidya is a noted blogger, author and a television panellist who regularly posts on her Facebook page which has over 87,000 followers.
Yesterday she posted an appeal to support a civil liberties organisation named “Indic Collective”. This organisation is a novel initiative taken by a Chennai-based registered trust of activists, intellectuals and civil liberty advocates. Their main aim is to usher in an Indian renaissance with the help of legal actions and initiatives.
According to them, their broad objective is to advocate via constitutional and democratic means, the right to an Indic way of life. As per them, their initiative has become imperative considering the rapidly shrinking space for Indic thought and values in its land of birth.
Few of their main objectives which they are trying to fulfil are:
- Freeing Hindu religious institutions from unconstitutional state control
- Deportation of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to the demographic balance and as a result, to national security
- Repelling blasphemy laws, fighting against illegal and fraudulent religious conversions
- Unconstitutional treatment of Indic educational institutions and recovery of stolen Indic artefacts.
They had recently moved to the Supreme Court with a petition that illegal Rohingyas be deported from India and have also announced that they are creating a review petition over the Supreme Court’s cracker ban:
Our review petition work over the crackers ban issue is in progress. We will update as and when it is filed.
— Indic Collective (@indiccollective) October 10, 2017
They have also tweeted out their Bank Account details, if anyone wished to help them in their activism:
Indic Collective Trust solicits your support to make our initiative for Indic Renaissance possible pic.twitter.com/9qJifE6T7H
— Indic Collective (@indiccollective) October 9, 2017
Impressed with organisation’s goals, Shefali posted an emotional appeal to support this organisation and later also thanked everyone for their overwhelming response. She also expressed her gratefulness to those who shared and supported the initiative based on their trust in her.
It was certainly commendable that so many people were receptive to the ideals and principles of the Indic organisation. But now it seems she had to pay a heavy price for her support:
My FB account is under a block 4 a week coz I shared the appeal of support for @indiccollective. Wonder how it affects FB ‘community stds’?
— Shefali Vaidya (@ShefVaidya) October 11, 2017
She also sent us a screenshot which contained this message by Facebook:
It was certainly strange as to why Facebook had chosen to ban an innocuous appeal to voluntarily help out an organisation. Incidentally till now Twitter India had developed a notorious reputation for suspending Right Wing accounts and those who made fun of AAP leaders.
One reason might be that Facebook strangely blocks accounts of people who share bank account details of people other than their own, and Shefali probably added Indic Collective’s bank account details along with her appeal.
However, in absence of any such clarification or communication from Facebook, many users saw it as unfair act by the website:
FB Community standards is biased towards certain Community
— Squint Neon (@squintneon) October 11, 2017
Shocking..guess someone from the lefties is handling the FB India ?
— Shrikant Aundhkar (@DoWhatNowShri) October 11, 2017
cc: @facebook Any answers https://t.co/QuBYDAyG75
— ಸುರೇಶ್ ಎನ್ Suresh N (@surnell) October 11, 2017
