Will WhatsApp quit India if it cannot compromise on Govt.'s policy?

Out of globally 1.5 billion users, India alone has over 23 crore monthly active users. India is thus WhatsApp's biggest market globally. Now, with the policy changes Whatsapp has said that they might have to leave India, if Govt. insists on enforcing the rules.

A strong and clear message is delivered - that they will not share data with Govt. Whatsapp has decided to take a hard stand on the issue on data sharing regulations being forced by Indian Govt.

Meanwhile, as Lok Sabha elections are very near, Whatsapp has issued a threat to all political parties in India. That their respective accounts can be banned if they don’t follow the rules. It clearly shows on how they are influencing the political parties to take their rule back.

Last year, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (TRAI) draft consultation paper, which aims to discuss the issue of regulating OTTs (over the top players) in India, was released to kickstart discussions and debates on this burning issue. Whatsapp, Skype, Hike etc are leading OTTs in India.

Following that the Govt. of India had been asking Whatsapp to share users’ data with them. However, Whatsapp continued to refuse Govt. of India’s request, saying that  it cannot trace messages of Indians. Indian Govt. has even threatened Whatsapp with a ban.

But now, Whatsapp has made it clear that there is no way they can share user information with Govt., even if that means quitting India entirely.

"Facebook-owned WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption by default which means only the sender and the recipient can see the messages in circulation - not even WhatsApp. The proposed changes are going overboard and are not consistent with strong privacy protections that people around the world are seeking," says Carl Woog, Head of Communications, WhatsApp.

Carl further said that in case Whatsapp introduced a feature to trace messages, and start sharing data with Govt., their core product will change and this cannot happen. Hence, leaving Indian operations seems to be a better way.

How will Govt. respond now? In a direct warning to all political leaders and parties, Whatsapp has stated that they won’t hesitate to ban their accounts if they resort to violating their policies.

“We have seen a number of (political) parties attempt to use WhatsApp in ways that were not intended and our firm message to them is using it in that way will result in bans,” Carl Woog said.

Whatsapp is mainly afraid that political parties will resort to automated bots and mass-circulation of messages to lure voters, via Whatsapp. And these are not allowed as per Whatsapp policies. Carl has said that Whatsapp is a private messaging platform, and not a megaphone to broadcast a message to masses.

During Karnataka elections, abusing Whatsapp and other messengers could have been a possibility as well. This is the reason Whatsapp has introduced new tools and software to track such unusual behavior and to stop mass-messaging. Over 2 million Whatsapp accounts have been banned in the last 12 months over these issues.