The Utterances of a Peculiar Mindset

Past few weeks were busy in discussion over issue of the IIPM saga..

Here is the whole story..

It all started June 15, when JAM ran an in-depth report debunking the advertised claims of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), a private business school that had spent more than $1 million in ads for its MBA program in May 2005. JAM found that IIPM had inflated claims about placing all of its students in jobs; having teachers from Harvard, Columbia and Yale; and luxurious extras such as swimming pools, mini golf and Wi-Fi towers.

Then blogger Gaurav Sabnis, an IBM salesman based in Mumbai, linked to the JAM article on Aug. 5 with a post titled, "The fraud that is IIPM." Perhaps the story would have died right there, but then IIPM made a tactical error by sending Sabnis a legal notice by e-mail on Oct. 4.

"The articles have caused unfathomable damage to the reputation of IIPM and to its various operational areas," the e-mail read. "The articles further have affected innumerable future operations of IIPM. We have legally notarized and logged all the releases and are sending you this e-mail to you as the first notice of proposed legal, judicial and criminal action against you that has already been approved & cleared by the Post Graduate Fellow Programme committee at IIPM."

While Sabnis at first found the whole legal threat funny, he wasn't laughing when his boss at IBM told him that IIPM was putting pressure on IBM (which sells laptops to IIPM) to get Sabnis to delete the blog posts. Plus, IIPM told IBM that its students were planning to burn their IBM laptops in protest. Sabnis quickly decided to quit his job at IBM to spare the company the PR nightmare.

Meanwhile, IIPM served similar legal notices to JAM magazine and another blogger who had written about the school, Varna Sriraman. The furor in the Indian blogosphere -- where bloggers refused to delete any posts -- finally caught the attention of the mainstream Indian media, which then covered IIPM's inflated claims.

But the legal threats from IIPM did nothing to cow bloggers or JAM Magazine. Rashmi Bansal, the editor and publisher of JAM and a blogger as well, told that IIPM's Chaudhuri and the school's dean A. Sandeep showed up at JAM's offices to accuse them of yellow journalism. After the visit, JAM received a 17-page legal notice threatening to sue JAM for defamation unless IIPM received a retraction and apology.

Amit Saxena, head of corporate communications for IIPM, sent a statement that tried to deflect the criticism of JAM and bloggers, and accused the latter of a slant toward the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), a more respected and established system of business schools.

"We are stunned as to how the most pampered students of India (i.e. from the IIM) suffer from so much inferiority complex from us that given the first opportunity to pen something (be it [former] IIM students like Rashmi Bansal or Gaurav Sabnis, and all other IIM students on the Net and other media), they stoop down so low as to write relentless lies and spread baseless rumors about IIPM," the statement read, in part. "But beyond a point IIPM can't allow these kinds of shallow rumors mongering to go on and had to take an action."

But Saxena would not discuss the details of the JAM expose, and IIPM has never explained discrepancies with its ads and the information unearthed by journalists and bloggers. Instead, IIPM has served legal notices, and a plethora of nameless blogs, allegedly by IIPM alumni, have sprouted up overnight defending IIPM and smearing the bloggers.

Well, on this all story, i can only say that I am with Rashmi and Gaurav.. I will never tolerate any defending of freedom of speech.. That was a typing mistake.. I wanted to say "I will never tolerate any attacking of freedom of speech.."