The Modi government has begun targeting the sources of misinformation, which are leading to all sorts of lies being fed to the farmers. Songs of ‘resistance’ and ‘revolution’ on YouTube have been serving as a ripe breeding ground for falsities to be spread regarding the farm reforms since the early days of the agitation in Punjab. Such songs have been at the forefront of painting a doomsday picture for the farmers, who now think that private corporations are on the way to gulp their livelihoods whole, while usurping their farmlands.
However, the days of glory for such songs are now over. Many Punjabi singers, who were hardly having a flourishing career, had taken to releasing a series of anti-government and anti-reform songs, based almost entirely on caste supremacy. This helped galvanising jatt support not only in Punjab against the reforms, but also in Haryana and Uttarakhand. Now, the government has come cracking down hard on such songs, and at least two of them have been deleted by YouTube.
‘Ailaan‘, a track by Punjabi singer Kanwar Grewal and Himmat Sandhu’s ‘Asi Vaddange‘ were removed from video-sharing app YouTube after legal complaints were reportedly filed against the videos by the Government of India, reported India Today. While Kanwar Grewal’s ‘Ailaan’ had garnered over 1 crore views at the time of deletion, Himmat Sandhu’s ‘Asi Vaddange’ was viewed 13 million times. Kanwar Grewal has become a face of the ongoing protests at Singhu and Tikri borders, and can be seen performing regularly at such venues, singing his songs of ‘resistance’.
‘Ailaan’ had become an anthem of such for the protestors from Punjab, with the main line of the song ‘faslaan de faaisle kisaan karuga’ (all farming decisions will be taken only by the farmers) becoming a tagline of the protests. ‘Asi Vaddange’, roughly translating to “we will break” revolved around the fake narrative of takeover of agricultural land by private players. Both the deleted songs had projected ‘Delhi’ as the eternal enemy.
According to reports, the central government has filed legal complaints against the “songs of resistance”, which did rounds on social media and were repeatedly heard being sung and performed at various farmers’ protest sites. The initiative by the government to tame vitriolic songs on YouTube comes in the backdrop of India’s IT Ministry issuing directives to Twitter to first block 250 accounts, and most recently, blocking another 1000+ accounts. Although none of the directives have been implemented yet, YouTube has taken the saner road, and deleted the two songs which the Modi government asked it to. Whether YouTube follows through with the government order, or defies it like Twitter is yet to be seen.