[UPDATE: Nodwind Gaming has put out another statement, this time, announcing the termination of Mannu from their employment due to his unacceptable behavior]
Important Notice: https://t.co/m39IjRHUrf pic.twitter.com/sEya7zCSYl
— NODWIN Gaming (@NodwinGaming) April 21, 2020
Original Story
The esports scene has been growing ‘relatively’ fast in India, all things considered. With more and more people getting into gaming, the industry has been expanding rather fast. However, controversies keep holding the scene back from achieving its true potential. The Indian gaming community bore witness to such a controversy in the last few days when a leading esports personality and PUBG Mobile host Mannu ‘kRat’ Karki was seen uttering foul, disgusting words in the middle of a CSGO match on Sostronk.
Rushant Malhotra was the guy who brought out the allegations in a Facebook post on the official Facebook group for the CSGO Indian community. According to the allegations, Mannu’s team was rude to them from the very beginning of the match, openly abusing them verbally and through the in-game chat. The horror started unfolding when Mannu (who goes by the in-game nick ‘DesiDalla’) asks about Rushant and starts abusing him even though he wasn’t in the game.
Apparently Rushant had worked with Nodwin Gaming earlier as a volunteer administrator, the organization that Mannu currently works for. Rushant alleges that Mannu and his teammates even went to the extent of stalking their social media accounts to get the names of their friends and family members to “upgrade” the abuses against him and his friends. Rushant wasn’t present in the CSGO match against Mannu, but his name was brought up by Mannu while his team went on a streak of abuses against Rushant’s friends.
If this seems problematic because of the level of the abuses thrown out, it wasn’t what really triggered the community. Rushant’s friend Vaibhav (going by the in-game nick VaiByGod) had to face awful comments (which included a ton of rape jokes) about his sister, including an abuse which compares her to “Nirbhaya”. That was the final nail in the coffin. “
For the uninitiated, “Nirbhaya” is the name given to the victim of the 2012 December gang rape. Needless to say, it is a sensitive topic and cannot be thrown around casually in the way the comments were made.
It should be noted when the post came out in Elite Groups (one of the most popular online gaming communities in India) and in CSGO India, Mannu had denied the accusations when he was asked about the same.
Eventually, when the community’s pressure for the comments mounted, Mannu decided to post an apology from a secondary page which he had made before he joined Nodwin as a caster. This irked the community even more since it meant that ‘Krat’ was trying to save his reputation on his main account (which goes by the name of ‘officialkrat’).
EDIT : The post has now been removed.
https://www.facebook.com/officialkrat/posts/2642719592636810
Nodwin Gaming has officially put Mannu on probation and will be investigating the case further before taking “the strictest action” possible.
Sostronk has also banned Mannu and his team for 7 days following the incident.
In all sincerity, it is expected that some serious punitive measures are taken for correction. Mannu Karki isn’t your everyday CSGO player, he is a caster for India’s growing PUBG M scene. If the toxicity at the topmost level is allowed is to breed, it will flow down to the lower layers, getting manifested in many different levels. Influencers argue about making the gaming scene safe for everyone to enjoy in, and then an incident like this happens which shatters the confidence of the people new to the scene.