Twitter India chief moves to new US role

Twitter’s India chief, Manish Maheshwari, will take up a new internal role in the United States, the company said on Friday, a move that comes after months of tussle between the US giant and the Indian government over compliance issues.

Maheshwari will become Twitter’s senior director of revenue strategy and operations focused on new market entry, based out of San Francisco, the company said in a statement.

Though Twitter gave no reasons for Maheshwari’s move in the statement, an internal staff memo seen by Reuters thanked him for his work during “extraordinarily challenging times” in India, without elaborating. Twitter declined to comment on the memo.

New Delhi has repeatedly criticised Twitter in recent months for not swiftly complying with the country’s new IT rules that required it to hire compliance officers by May. The US firm completed the required hiring and complied with the new rules this month, the government has said.

The new rules, which became effective end-May, are aimed at regulating content on social media and making firms act more swiftly on legal requests to remove posts.

Twitter also faced several ongoing police cases, with some naming Maheshwari, for allegedly hurting sentiments and promoting child pornography. He also had to seek court relief in at least one case where he was asked to appear for police questioning in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

The internal staff memo said that “instead of a single country director, our wonderful India leadership council will guide and support you all as a team moving forward.”

Twitter’s struggles in India, along with the regulatory scrutiny of other US tech firms such as Facebook’s WhatsApp and Amazon.com, have hurt the business environment in a key growth market, prompting some companies to rethink expansion plans, Reuters has reported.

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.

Twitter has about 22.1 million users in India out of its global total of 206 million, making the South Asian country its third-largest market, according to market intelligence firm Statista based on July data.