Wiki entries on Jawaharlal Nehru family edited from National Informatics Centre IP?

NEW DELHI: The National Informatics Centre (NIC) has started an internal inquiry to find out who had made a slew of provocative alterations in Wikipedia profiles of Jawaharlal Nehru, his father and grandfather. The Wikipedia pages on India’s first PM, his father Motilal Nehru and grandfather Gangadhar Nehru were altered from a central government IP address, according to an independent digital policy think-tank. The changes were made in the profiles of three Nehru generations for the sake of uniformity of information. However, the changes — made on June 26 between 9.12 am and 10.02 am — were detected by Wikipedia editors and undone within minutes.

In the attempted edits in Nehru’s profile it was stated that he was actually a Muslim, born in a red-light area of Allahabad, and that his relationship with Edwina Mountbatten resulted in partition as she blackmailed him. To establish Nehru’s background credibly, the user also made corresponding changes in profiles of his grandfather and father. “Gangadhar was born as a Muslim by the name of Ghiasuddin Ghazi but changed his name to a Hindu Ganga Dhar to escape from British clutches,” the attempted edit said. A similar edit was done to Motilal Nehru’s profile.

The changes were discovered by a bot that tracks anonymous changes made to Wikipedia entries by GoI employees, using the NIC IP address. The bot is run using the Twitter handle @ AnonGoIWPEdits. Each time a change is made anonymously in any Wiki page by an NIC IP address user, a bot automatically sends out a tweet. The bot was created by Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at Centre for Internet and Society.