The participants at an online event organised by the Ambedkar Periyar Student Circle of IIT Madras on Wednesday said that they were quite surprised to see a few participants whose usernames seemed unusual. They had logged in to listen to an online lecture by Vijoo Krishnan, the Joint Secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha about the new Farm bills.
However, soon after the lecture began, abuses were hurled at Krishnan by some of these users. "Then there was a huge ruckus," Krishnan said. At one point, some of them even shared pornographic content, making it difficult for him to talk. "The moderator was struggling to mute a lot of these users. They were all anonymous and their usernames sounded Spanish. There were around 10 of them," says a PhD scholar who attended the event. The lecture was later shifted to another private Google Meet session and was live-streamed on APSC's Facebook page.
The experience, for Krishnan, was unsavoury, "They (disruptors) were unable to reply logically to my points. There was enough scope for question and answer and a debate," says Krishnan. Recovering from post-COVID complications, Krishnan was talking about the farmers' protest and the farm laws. "I have been with the farmers since 2009 and I know the ground reality. These trolls could have refuted my points logically and debunked my arguments. However, they were not able to do so," says Krishnan, who called the trolls immature. "It shows to what level they can stoop," he adds.
The organisers of the event, on the other hand, said that the students who disrupted the event logged in from random IDs so they feel that it was planned in advance but don't know who exactly was behind it. Since the IDs are random, they don't see the point of approaching the administration with the issue. They had also issued an apology to all the attendees. "The act by the hooligans show how shaken they are by the farmer protests, and how desperately they want to contain even a discussion on this topic. The specific web conference software used for today's event lacked certain host privileges therefore it was extremely difficult from our end to tackle it," reads the statement. "We will invest more thought in sorting out our logistics to ensure our viewers an environment that is devoid is such disruptions from people who don't believe in democracy," it read.
