Gandhinagar, May 2021: A sting operation by The Hindustan Grimes in association with CID Gujarat has revealed operations of the BJP IT Cell’s West Wing (WW). The covert operation, led by our very own Momo, began in early January this year. There is speculation that The Grimes was started as a front for the operation.
“The IT Cell always reached me through the grapevine, but finding them directly took a lot of effort,” said a visibly ruffled Momo. “It began with a lot of hanging around family groups and neighbourhood uncles’ groups. That yielded only forwards. Then, we started setting our own traps. One of my avatars went in so deep, it got the forwards before they were even labelled forwards.”
“Finally, we found one of their creatives’ real facebook account,” Momo continued. “We made up an advertising account and asked FB for his address so we could sell him banyans and they just gave it to us. That is when the whole operation went sour.”
It turns out that the IT Cell operative that the operation found was quite normal and did not need to be especially tortured to speak about the Cell’s operations. She was quite friendly and spoke openly.
The WW IT Cell, internally known as Forward Factory, primarily consists of struggling writers who never made it in mainstream writing. “There is no long form reading audience that’ll connect with our Indian stories,” she said. “And Bollywood doesn’t like writers getting creative, so this is the only choice. It even pays well.”
The IT Cell writers add that they don’t have faith in the conventional news agencies. One, they don’t have the money, and the ones’ that do have money shouldn’t be called news agencies anyway. Two, they write just about anything. Three, you are forced to write about celebrities or politicians all the time. “At least we don’t say it’s all true and sign our names under it,” said an anonymous writer, who goes by @shambiguity.
“FF takes care of us,” said @mrpatel, another writer. “The IT Cells up north are generally okay. But some of the Cells in the fringes are almost prison cells and are run like Chinese card factories. Those imprisoned indentured slave-like writers don’t even get EPFO.”
The sting operation also revealed that multiple attempts at unionisation of the writers have been crushed, sometimes with the involvement of police officers. Suspected officers have been put on paid suspension. It is believed that the PM appreciates IT Cells’ growth and views them as successes of Aatmanirbharata and Make in India programs, but is also in talks with Amazon for their expertise. “No one crushes unionisation attempts and exploits workers like they do. Every capitalist could learn a thing or two from Amazon,” said Dr. Subramanian Swamy, MP and former professor of economics.
The PMO has said that this was one of the avenues for creating employment for the youth in the country. The IT Cells’ funding was accounted for in the union budget. Upon enquiry about why this was not revealed earlier, the PMO confessed to a large backlog of announcements. “We have some announcements pending since last December,” said the PMO reply. “We’ve not even got to the announcements about placing orders for vaccines for 18-44! Oh wait! We still have to place the orders first.”
Television news broadcasters however have ignored the sting operation in favour of the failed return attempts of COVID19, IPL, and Sushant Singh Rajput.