Twitter India's chief was questioned by Delhi Police on May 31 in the case involving an alleged “Congress toolkit”, news reports suggest.
Manish Maheshwari, Managing Director of Twitter India, was questioned by the Delhi Police’s Special Cell in Bengaluru, Karnataka, reports added.
The questioning reportedly happened a few days after Delhi Police teams had visited Twitter's offices in Delhi and Gurugram, Haryana to serve a notice in the toolkit case.
The controversy over the alleged toolkit erupted after senior leaders of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had, on May 18, shared a document which suggested a plot to tarnish the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his handling of COVID-19. The document, they alleged, was released by Congress.
The Congress subsequently wrote to Twitter, claiming that the document was "fake" and created on a "forged letterhead" of the party's research department. The opposition party demanded the suspension of the Twitter accounts of top BJP leaders, including party chief JP Nadda and Union Minister Smriti Irani, for allegedly spreading misinformation.
The social media giant has also been under pressure from the Indian government over non-compliance of the new IT rules that came into effect on May 26. On June 16, multiple news reports suggested that Twitter had lost its intermediary status in India due to this non-compliance.
Twitter said it has appointed an interim Chief Compliance Officer and the details of the official will be shared with the IT Ministry directly soon. The company also added that it is working to comply with the new rules.
The Centre had issued a notice to Twitter giving it one last chance to “immediately” comply with the new IT rules and warned that failure to adhere to the norms will lead to the platform losing exemption from liability under the IT Act.