By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter
In what seems like a case of an attack on Dalit-Bahujan spaces in social media, Facebook has barred National Dastak from sharing any links from their website on their Facebook page.
On Wednesday morning, the admins of National Dastak found out that while they could share photos and write on their Facebook page, they were barred from sharing any link until. The National Dastak team has written to Facebook and is waiting for an official reason.
National Dastak since its inception has found an extensive readership for its tough stance on caste issues, Brahminical setups in various institutions and Hindutva politics prevailing in India these days.
Following the Facebook decision, many of the supporters of National Dastak came forward with the hashtag ‘#IAmWithNationalDastak’.
People on social media have called this as an attack on the freedom of expression. Some claimed this decision of Facebook inspired by ‘Manusmriti’.
National Dastak has provided a lot of space to writers and journalists from the Dalit-Bahujan community to present news and views which show their side of the daily reports and without a Savarna perspective. Dilip C Mandal, Former Editor of India Today magazine, is mentoring the National Dastak team.
Interestingly, while the social media went into an outrage when NDTV was banned for a day, the response on social media for this ban on National Dastak has not been equally strong. This ban on their Facebook page has got little, if any, response from mainstream media and websites.
One of the reasons could be that a number of people have not come upfront because of faulty journalistic practices of National Dastak according to a few mainstream media outlets. In the past, Journalists from ‘The Lallantop’ and The Wire have accused National Dastak and its mentor Dilip Mandal for copy lifting their original stories without giving the due credit to the outlets.
Nevertheless, the Dalit-Bahujan community continues to show its strong support on Facebook and Twitter. The Hashtag #iamwithnationaldastak is trending and its Facebook page, which has around 3.5 lakh page likes, is seeing a lot of traffic.