Congress’ ‘Donate for Desh’ drive hits cyber snag: BJP nets domains in witty web warfare

The Congress had indeed registered a website with a different domain name 'donateinc.net', but the damage was done by then.

Hyderabad: An initiative by the Indian National Congress (INC) to mobilise funds through ‘crowdfunding’ titled ‘Donate For Desh’ launched on Monday, ended up in a comic situation with the party forgetting to register the domain name with .com and .org top-level domain for the initiative.

Its arch political rival, the BJP quickly encashed on the faux pas and got the domains ‘donatefordesh.com and donatefordesh.org’ registered and anyone hitting these web addresses are directed to the BJP website.

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The Congress had indeed registered a website with a different domain name ‘donateinc.net’, but the damage was done by then. Curious netizens began commenting on how the Congress should have registered the domain names first before launching the donation drive.

Perhaps, the Congress tech cell functionaries were a little slow on getting the domain names registered and their party became an unwitting victim of cyber squatting.

Launching the donation drive, the AICC president Mallikarjun Kharge maintained that it was the first time the Congress was asking people to donate for the nation. He reasoned it out saying if one were to depend only on the rich people, they had to follow their policies. “Mahatma Gandhi also took donations from the public during the freedom struggle…”, he observed.

It is not known immediately how many donations did the Congress receive, but the initiative got excellent publicity on social media platforms, thanks to the quickthinking by the BJP tech cell functionaries.