The Centre has, in reply to RTI queries, said it has no information on the trolls who targeted foreign secretary Vikram Misri and his daughter following the end of military conflict between India and Pakistan.

Misri and his daughter became victims of a vicious online attack by pro-war trolls after the cessation of hostilities was announced on May 10. The trolls had put out their personal details and accused Misri of treason.

Misri’s daughter, a lawyer, was slammed by several Right-wing X handles for helping the Rohingyas in Myanmar and writing for The Wire, one of the many news websites that were blocked along with some 8,000 X handles during the conflict over the government’s concern about the spread of misinformation related to Operation Sindoor.

Venkatesh Nayak, director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, had used the RTI route to seek from the external affairs ministry a list of accounts, which targeted the foreign secretary. He had sent a similar RTI query to
the electronics and IT ministry as well.

Both ministries replied that they had no information on the topic.

In an appeal to the external affairs ministry to reconsider his query, Nayak wrote: “Other public authorities under this government have quickly acted to invoke the relevant provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the applicable Information Technology Rules, to get CERT-IN (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team of the IT ministry) to take down other kinds of offensive content from social media and other digital media platforms, in the past.

“It is unbelievable that this ministry has not acted in a similar manner with regard to the recent trolling of the foreign secretary. The CPIO’s (Central Public Information Officer) obtuse and evasive reply amounts to admitting that this government did nothing to take action against the social media accounts and their offensive operators who attacked the foreign secretary with extreme prejudice and using very offensive language.

“This does not inspire any degree of confidence in the minds of us the citizenry about this government’s ability to protect its senior functionaries from attacks on social media platforms. This also does not align with this government’s policy of not keeping quiet when violence is committed against Indian citizens and their property by external enemies and their local agents.”

Nayak got the same reply — “The information is not available with this office”— to his appeal as well.