Mercury Rising: Foreign Hand

As a test case in Operation Blue Virus, Cobrapost decided to see if Priyadarshan Pathak—from the firm Websol Media, Gurgaon—would deliver negative publicity as promised. Cobrapost told Pathak to go online to “fix” a company, Mercury Aviation, that had ‘wro­nged’ Netaji. Except that, unbeknownst to Pathak, the company and its website were fake. The deal was sett­led for Rs 92,000; Cob­ra­post paid Rs 45,000 for the job, which Pathak accepted and counted in front of the camera.

When our reporter met Pathak later that month, he handed over prints of the pages of various social media sites such as Facebook. There was a lot of negative material, sometimes with expletives and at other times with cartoons and caricatures of the aviation company. There was enough material to make one cringe at the fictitious Mercury Aviation’s “unfair practices”; the pages destroyed its reputation completely with allegations, among others, of money-laundering, allowing terrorists to use its equipment, and defrauding its passengers in the name of charity.

Pathak’s partner in crime is one Jitendra Dalal, apparently based in the US. Pathak explains in detail how he made it happen: “I have given Dalal my e-mail address because he has got a team, so he does this from anybody’s system. What happens in the US is that you don’t have to give your name for the internet, you simply have to make them the payment and you are allotted a code.” This is the simple way the source or authorship of such malicious content remains undetected, and you can operate your shady racket from the US sitting here in India.