Ola CEO Bhavesh Agarwal attacked Microsoft and LinkedIn for their “woke” policy. On X, a microblogging site (formerly known as Twitter), Agarwal posted that Linkedin believes Indians require pronouns. He emphasized the need to resist imposed ideologies and said that Indians ‘Don’t need lessons from Western companies on how to be tolerant.’
This left him at odds with LinkedIn.pronoun illness’Won’t spread across India.
He posed his situation to an AI bot on LinkedIn. The bot replied including “they” and “their” instead of “he” or “his,” addressing Ola’s founder.
Linkedin deleted his post arguing that it was unsafe as claimed by Aggarwal in his X post. His second post was also deleted by this platform. This time around though, Ola CEO also tagged Microsoft in Aggarwal’s reposting on X.
The following is the full text of Aggarwal’s post on X criticizing LinkedIn and Microsoft:
Ola is an Indian institution truly committed to taking real action on diversity in line with its claim. In fact, we run one of the largest car factories in the world that exclusively employs women! It is not even 1 out of 10 rows or a small section; it is the whole plant! There are almost 5 000 women now, and this number will rise towards tens of thousands during the next years. Our gender inclusivity does not need teaching from westerns about inclusion. For many millennia now pronouns have not been required by our culture in order for them to be inclusive. One year ago I myself went to Ayodhya and learnt how transgenders have since immemorial times been given special respects in our culture!
However, the pronoun issue that I write about is a woke political ideology of rights from which India is exempted. I am not going to venture into this debate but it seems Linkedin thinks we need pronouns in our lives as Indians and they cannot be criticized. They will force us to see things their way or disqualify us. If they could do this to me then the average user doesn’t stand a chance. As a founder and CEO, this Western DEI system has had a significant impact on my business because it fosters an entitlement mentality in our careers that I will fight against.
This situation made me realize that we need to build our own Indian technology platform. It’s not like I hate global technology companies. But as an Indian citizen, my life can easily be taken over by big Western tech monopolies and we will be culturally assimilated according to what has been shown above. It is separated from Ola or any other company of mine. Consequently Ola in particular cannot contribute towards solving this matter at all because it tends to be very small-scale operations-wise. In the face of such compelled ideologies, I wish to rise up as an independent thinking Indian while doing my best here are the measures I’m taking; Putting my money where my mouth is.
While Linkedin’s monopoly cannot be solved overnight, I am committed to working with the Indian developer community in building a DPI social media framework. UPI, ONDC, Aadhar and more specifically are indigenous ideas that can be implemented in the social media sector as well. Indian law should be the only “community norm.” Nobody in business should decide what is restricted. Data should be owned by its creators not by companies who sell it and then lecture us about “community guidelines”!
Because Ola is a large Azure customer and LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, we have decided to move our entire workload from Azure to our own cloud @Krutrim during next week. Everyone knows this is quite hard for developers but my team loves it.
Any other developers wishing to migrate out of Azure will get one full year free participation in the cloud. Just never go back into Azure again! Write exitazure@olakrutrim.com for any information you may need. The offer remains open all the time!
