NEW DELHI: Indian police have filed preliminary charges against senior Twitter officials over an inaccurate map of the country, an official said on Tuesday, in the latest escalation between the US firm and New Delhi.

Uttar Pradesh state police said the criminal case was filed against two Twitter India officials late on Monday following a complaint from the local head of a Hindu nationalist group that the US firm’s website showed the held Kashmir region as an independent country.

The map was already taken down from Twitter’s “Tweep Life” career section after an uproar by social media users on Monday against the micro-blogging site.

A police official said that Twitter’s India head Manish Maheshwari and another senior employee were being investigated for breaching India’s IT laws and causing public mischief.

“This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me,” Praveen Bhati from Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group, said in his complaint.Twitter has been locked for several months in an acrimonious row with New Delhi over new rules for social media companies operating in India.

The regulations require firms to remove and identify the “first originator” of posts deemed to undermine India’s sovereignty, state security or public order.

Social media companies and privacy activists fear the vagueness of the rules means they could be forced to identify the authors of posts critical of the government.

WhatsApp is challenging the rules in court, fearing that it will have to break its system of encryption that prevents anyone other than the sender and receiver from reading messages.

The government has said that failing to comply could strip tech companies of the legal protection granted to intermediaries in India.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2021