Sunil Ambekar, national organising secretary of the RSS’s student wing ABVP. Sunil Ambekar, national organising secretary of the RSS’s student wing ABVP.

In the backdrop of a pending data protection Bill that mandates increased data localisation, Sunil Ambekar, the national organising secretary of the RSS’s student wing ABVP, cautioned against the global “war on data” and encouraged citizens to embrace the “concept of external sovereignty that was established in Hindu philosophy”.

Ambekar was the keynote speaker at the Constitution Club for the launch of the book Data Sovereignty: The Pursuit of Supremacy, authored by Vinit Goenka — BJP’s IT Cell co-convener in 2014, who now works on IT solutions for Indian Railways — and co-authored by Lt Gen Vinod Kandare, who was the director of the General Defense Intelligence Agency, and other security and technology officials.

He said, “Military attacks we can understand easily. But the silent proxy war on data is more difficult to understand. Similarly, the Naxal war and Naxalites we can understand but urban naxals are more difficult to understand… They say that they make the whole world a small village … but the power to attack has grown.”

He said that centuries of foreign rule in India has taken away the country’s sovereignty and “pursuit of supremacy”, and the next frontier of this competition is over data.

“Chanakya said that until paradeentha (dependency) is not over, swaraja pura nahin hota hain (self-governance is not complete),” he told The Indian Express. “Because of thousands of years of foreign rule, we have lost that pursuit of supremacy. We have thought that they are taking the data, no problem… We need to protect our borders and the same way we need to protect our data.”

Meanwhile, Vinit Goenka said that India missed the latest industrial revolution because the country was “a victim of external aggression”, and that external companies are again seeking the information of Indians.

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