Anna posted earlier about the IIPM affair, where a degree mill in India has pressured a blogger into leaving his job by threatening his employer, simply because they didn’t like a site he linked to.
One thing has been bothering me about this kerfuffle: we have long called for commercial boycotts, e.g. of advertisers with racist radio stations, as preferable to government regulation. At first blush it seems like the IIPM, however false their case and however toady and odious their tactics, were within their rights to threaten to protest at IBM/Lenovo.
But here’s the key difference. When we called for a boycott to get a racist DJ fired, we weren’t going after the DJ’s personal hobbies or his family. We were calling for it because of actions directly in the course of business, actively supported by the DJ’s employer.
In this case, the IIPM didn’t respond to the original article in JAM magazine directly. It didn’t talk with Gaurav Sabnis, the hobbyist blogger who merely cross-linked. It didn’t post a comment with a point by point refutation of the article. That’s what a credible response looks like.
It didn’t, in fact, backing up its assertions in any way whatsoever. Instead it went stalker by going after a completely unrelated party, his day job, his employer, and issuing filmi, melodramatic threats. Burning laptops? Please. That’s like the Indian college students who threaten self-immolation over a minor fee hike. The more nuclear and disproportionate the threat, the less credible, and IBM/Lenovo knows it.
Where does that stop? If someone doesn’t like a site you linked to, do they start calling up and threatening your wife and kids? It’s straight-up blackmail and political thuggery. It’s like the saffronist goon squads who intimidate local candidates and fix elections. It’s like Plamegate, where American politicians who disliked a man’s political opinions treasonously blew his wife’s C.I.A. cover.
It is, in fact, the last refuge of the weak: when the facts don’t support you, bluster and threaten. It’s totally laudable that Sabnis didn’t want to expose his employer to commercial repercussions from something it had nothing to do with. But aside from IIPM, the fault here lies also with IBM/Lenovo for accepting the sucker punch and hinting to Sabnis that the drama wasn’t really welcome.
Commercial pressure is legitimate when applied to related parties. It is totally illegitimate when someone drags a business dispute across private boundaries. That’s usually when you call the cops.
The sucker punch is the definitive mark of a loser. IIPM, your name is mud.
DesiPundit has the roundup. Related posts: one, two
Update: Renegade of Junk penned a parody:
Arindam Choudhry, on being asked for a comment, replied, “We have submitted an ultimatum to IBM that unless they hire new IIPM graduates by tomorrow, we will begin immolating our students on campus… we have students threatening to self-flagellate on the Wipro campus, self-mutilate outside the Infosys building and self-fellate at the TCS office.” [Link]
