Following the botched up ‘sting operation’ by India Today, which tried to falsely depict alleged left-wing students as ABVP members and implicate them for the crimes that the left-wing forces unleashed on January 5 inside campus, the India Today has suffered a massive meltdown and has indulged in attempts to brazen it out despite being caught red-handed.
On Sunday, in a similar act, the India Today media network yet again indulged in another false propaganda against the JNU administration to absolve ultra-left wing forces from their crimes.
Tanushree Pandey, the India Today journalist, came up with a gem as she claimed that they had accessed emails sent from the server of Communication and Information services, which have been damaged by the left-wing students on January 4. With claims of emails sent by JNU administration, she hinted at no damage for servers as stated by Delhi police.
The ‘journalist’ who seems to have no idea regarding how the system of email works implied that if emails could be sent from these servers, how could someone claim that servers have been damaged by left-wing students.
.@IndiaToday accesses mails sent from the server of Communication & Info Services, which was down acc to #JNU admin after left students vandalised server room. Administration said that registration process couldn’t take place because server was down. So how did the mass mails go? pic.twitter.com/B0gCAhd5Uy
— Tanushree Pandey (@TanushreePande) January 11, 2020
Soon, NDTV journalist Arvind Gunasekar also made similar bizarre claims on how could JNU administration could send mails if the servers at CIS had already damaged.
JNU VC had said that Communication and Information Service was vandalised by students on Jan 4 and so CCTVs weren’t working on Jan 5th…University’s digital services came to a stand still till Jan 8.
If so, how was this mail sent by CIS (mailing server) on Jan 5 at 1.58 PM ?! pic.twitter.com/Z7qWqZdSC2
— Arvind Gunasekar (@arvindgunasekar) January 11, 2020
Gunasekar, himself, is a JNU alumni and one would expect at least he would know how the internal mails in JNU work.
In a hurry to target ABVP students and JNU administration, the ‘journalists’ seems to have waged war against science and technology as they failed to even comprehend basic technological aspects behind the working of an email system.
According to India Today journalist Tanushree Pande, the emails cannot be sent by the JNU administration if the servers at the CIS is damaged, thereby insinuating that left students had not damaged servers inside the JNU as stated by Delhi police. The emails have been sent by JNU administration on January 5, a day after the servers were damaged by leftist goons.
However, in reality, ‘journalists’ seem to be thinking that the servers at JNU is using the same server for email that is used for other activities like regisration for semester and Wi-Fi access in the campus. To their embarrassment, the ‘journalists’ have utterly failed to comprehend the basic difference between mail servers and web servers.
But a simple online search of the MX record of JNU’s email domain shows that the university’s email servers are not located in its campus. Tech-savvy netizens quickly pointed outed that JNU is using Google Suite, a corporate solution from Google that includes the facitlity to use Gmail with custom domain names, for all its email needs. Therefore, the email servers are not located inside the JNU campus, but they are located in the servers farms operated by tech giant Google, which are located outside India.
Hello tech illiterate journalist of @IndiaToday, JNU uses G Suite for Education for email needs. So the mail server is not located on campus. A simple MX record lookup of https://t.co/71ocgf3UtR would’ve told you that. https://t.co/4VS1gr4BcS pic.twitter.com/eadOJoqx8A
— Spaminder Bharti (@attomeybharti) January 11, 2020
According to the MXtoolweb site, the “jnu.ac.in” site, which is the email domain of JNU, is hosted on Google servers and not on the servers which are damaged inside the JNU campus. A IP location lookup of associated IP addresses point to Google headquarters at Mountain View, California, the address Google uses to register its servers.
Moreover, as per another online tool ultratools.com, JNU’s mail servers are located in the US, as it shows the locations along with the owner of the servers.
From the above, it can be categorically said that although JNU uses servers located in the campus for other IT-related activities, it is not hosting its own email server. As they are using Gmail services, their mails are hosted by Google, not by CIS at JNU. Therefore, the JNU administration can still send and receive emails from any computer connected to internet and is not dependent on the JNU network. As the left-wing students had only disabled the CIS servers and Wi-Fi access in the campus, it is possible that the computers used by the JNU administration were connected to the internet independently or with a separate network which was still functioning, and it was not dependent on the servers which were damaged as claimed by our esteemed ‘journalists’.
It can be noted that although earlier companies and instutions used to host their own email servers, that trend has changed and now most organisations use corporate email solutions provided by companies such as Google and Microsoft.
It seems there have been concerted campaigns against the ABVP in an alleged effort to save the ultra left-wing students, who are the main accused in the JNU violence. As Delhi police revealed that seven left-wing students, including Aishe Ghosh – the president of JNUSU – and four left students organisations were responsible for the barbaric violence that was inflicted on students on the campus, left-wing ‘liberal-secular’ media have resorted to a hit job against the ABVP.
Soon after Delhi police carried out the press conference in which evidence was released to the public regarding the involvement of ultra-left-wing students in the violence, India Today had come up with a shoddy sting operation claiming two JNU students allegedly belonging to the ABVP confessed on camera for instigating violence and vandalising the Sabarmati hostel on January 5.
A detailed fact-check was done by OpIndia regarding the so-called India Today sting operation and proved that the whole investigation was nothing but lies and half-truths to falsely implicate ABVP and absolve left-wing forces from its crimes that they had unleashed on JNU campus.
India Today had not only failed to prove that the two members belonged to ABVP but also indulged in fake news by sharing misleading images.
Responding to India Today’s hit job, the nationalist students’ organisation ABVP had categorically rejected charges that the two alleged JNU students were associated with the organisation. Despite clarifications by the ABVP, India Today had carried out their fake story to mislead the public on the JNU violence.
Interestingly, one of the students- Akshat Awasthi, who India Today had ‘exposed’ in its fake sting operation on Saturday as a member of ABVP, had retracted his statements by stating that whatever statements he had made to the India Today reporter were false and said he only such confessions simply to display bravado. In fact, Awasthi has said that he is not even a member of ABVP.
