Indian tech leaders support Ola’s Bhavish against Microsoft, LinkedIn

Zoho's CEO Sridhar Vembu echoed Aggarwal's sentiment, stating, "India must firmly oppose this woke imperialism."

New Delhi: Indian tech industry leaders have come out in support of Ola Founder and CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal, after his tirade against Microsoft-owned LinkedIn for deleting his posts and “bullying Indians” into agreeing with the Big Tech platforms or cancelling them out.

Homegrown IT software company Zoho’s CEO Sridhar Vembu agreed with Aggarwal, saying “we in India have to strongly resist this woke imperialism”.

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“It is best understood as a fanatical religious doctrine that masquerades as a socio-political movement,” Vembu posted on X social media platform.

Edtech company Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal earlier posted that this is so “f***** up on LinkedIn’s part”.

An angry Ola CEO on Saturday announced the termination of Microsoft Azure cloud’s services and moved the entire workload of his company to his own AI venture called Krutrim.

“We’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim cloud within the next week,” he said in a blog post.

When reached, LinkedIn or Microsoft did not comment on Aggarwal’s blog post.

The tussle began when Ola CEO shared his thoughts on gender pronouns, with a LinkedIn post on “pronoun illness”.

The LinkedIn AI chatbot used “they” and “their” to address the founder.

The professional networking platform later deleted Aggarwal’s posts “without notifying him”, leading to an outburst from the Ola founder.

“Proud of you Bhavish. When CEOs like you show the way, I’m sure many will emulate you. It is one thing to coax people to be inclusive but quite another to use bullying and cancelling techniques to impose a fake inclusiveness with dubious benefit. May Dharma always guide you,” Author Sahana Singh posted on X.

Aggarwal has said he will work with the domestic developer community to build a digital public infrastructure (DPI) social media framework and the only ‘community guidelines’ should be the Indian law.

“Woke” was a word earlier used within Black communities in the US to refer to an “awareness of inequality”.

It is now being frequently used in political parlance to describe anything that appears too liberal or progressive.