Greta Thunberg’s Indian social media manager receives cyber backlash after her tweet on farmers' protest

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg

By Rajesh V and Meera Manu 

Greta Thunberg’s social media manager is being bombarded with threat calls after the Swedish climate activist expressed her support for farmers’ protest in India.

Adarsh Prathap is a climate activist in India who serves as a delegate at the UN’s Climate Change organization. He also handles Greta’s social media handles. Now, Adarsh is being blamed for passing over information to Greta regarding the ongoing farmers' protest in India.

Adarsh who hails from Kerala told News18 that there has also been an attempt to hack his Facebook page.

"My job is to repost what Greta writes, and not to add my opinions into it," Adarsh told News 18. He said he has been to the United Nations in 2017-18 period as youth reporter of Climate Change Conference.

Greta’s tweets in support of the protests near Delhi against farm reform laws are among many posts that have drawn international attention over the past two many days to the farmers' agitation that began in November.

READ:  How Rihanna, Greta Thunberg's tweets backing farmers' protest put agitation on global map

On February 3, ministry of external affairs (MEA) issued a statement saying “it is unfortunate to see vested interest groups trying to enforce their agenda on these (farmers’) protests, and derail them”. Delhi Police on February 4 Thursday filed a case against unknown persons in connection with the toolkit, tweeted by Greta, one among Nobel Peace Prize nominees this year. 

Adarsh said first met Greta on the sidelines of the UN conference on climate change. In 2018, ‘Fridays For Future’, a movement started in which  Greta Thunberg, then 15, and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis.

Also read : 'How dare you?': Here are instances of Greta Thunberg taking on world leaders

“People following her page is on the rise and I continue re-posting. We aim to drive home the message of global climate change. I am not interfering with her personal opinion,"  Adarsh said.

In January 2020, a Facebook bug revealed that the accounts behind some of the posts were those belonging to her father Svante Thunberg and Adarsh. But Greta has since reached out to her nearly three million followers insisting she has written every single one of them.

Enacted in September 2020, the three farm laws have been projected by the Centre as major reforms in the agriculture sector. But the opposition parties allege that the farm laws were brought 'without any consultations with states and farmer unions and lacked national consensus'.

Thousands of protesting farmers, primarily from Punjab and Haryana, have been camping at several Delhi border points for over two months, demanding the repeal of the laws, and a legal guarantee on minimum support prices (MSP) for their crops.