PM Modi exits Weibo account, posts taken down

BEIJING: Prime Minister Narendra Modi exited his Weibo account on Wednesday, a day after India banned 59 Chinese apps, and with the armies of the two countries facing off along the de factor border after a skirmish in Eastern Ladakh on June 15 left 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese soldiers dead.

“The message is loud and clear. If red lines are crossed, there will be consequences, “the BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya said on Twitter.

All posts on Modi’s Weibo profile have been taken down, as has been his profile photograph.

The removal of all information from Modi’s Weibo account comes 10 days after at least three official Indian statements – including the PM’s – were deleted from the Indian embassy’s official account on the popular Chinese social media app, WeChat.

“We are taking action to unsubscribe the account,” an Indian embassy official told HT.

Modi’s Weibo account was set up in 2015 amid much fanfare and publicity before his first visit to China as PM. Since then the account has built 244,000 followers, many of them Chinese.

HT has reached out to the Chinese foreign ministry for a comment on this development.

On June 20, an India’s external affairs ministry statement about the Indian position on the ongoing border tension with China was mysteriously deleted from the embassy’s official Weibo account a day before the WeChat posts were deleted. Tencent, a Chinese tech company that owns WeChat, didn’t respond to HT’s questions on the issue.