For most global tech executives running an India operation, the job usually means navigating ministry notices and compliance deadlines from a policy desk, not answering a local police station's summons. This week, that distinction blurred for Meta's India head.
Hyderabad Cybercrime police have registered two separate cases naming Arun Srinivas, Meta Platforms' India head, alongside the unidentified operators of several Facebook and Instagram accounts, over allegedly morphed and digitally altered content depicting Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The complaints, reported on July 31, describe the material as obscene, derogatory, and misleading, with parts possibly generated or altered using AI, and investigators are weighing potential offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act. One complaint came from a 29 year old businessman who says he found the content while browsing Instagram; the other was filed by a member of the Telangana BJP's social media cell. Both asked police to preserve digital evidence and pull subscriber records from Meta, and one alleges the company was slow to remove the material. No arrest has been reported, key procedural details remain undisclosed, and Meta has not issued a public response.
The filings arrive in the same week as a separate, unrelated dispute. A video posted from Modi's own Facebook account on July 23 briefly became inaccessible to users in India on July 28, something Meta attributed to an error before restoring it. That incident drew a summons from India's IT ministry for Meta's global public policy head, and a parliamentary standing committee is due to take up the removal on August 3.
Legal experts point out that Section 79 of the IT Act shields platforms from liability for user-posted content, provided they act once a valid court order or government notification arrives, a threshold a private complaint alone does not meet under a 2015 Supreme Court ruling. What naming a country head does, regardless of how the cases resolve, is shift part of the dispute from a policy-and-compliance channel into a personal, procedural one, a pattern India has seen before with executives at other platforms.
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