Sruthi Chandran & Debian Diversity, Favoritism, Hidden Conflicts of Interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
09:30 Sun, 15 Mar 2026
The nominations closed on Friday the 13th, with only one candidate submitting a nomination around midnight in her timezone.
If Sruthi Chandran was aware of the creepy date and all the other controversy then she has been brave to submit the nomination in those circumstances. Nominating also means she is subject to a higher level of scrutiny than regular volunteers. Even if we have concerns about some aspects of her candidacy, we should also be respectful of those things that are positive about it.
The voting finishes on 17 April 2026, the anniversary of a notorious death that was discussed like a suicide, a copy-cat suicide. The victim died on our wedding day. No report was ever published. The victim's widow, Diana von Bidder-Senn became the mayor of Basel in Switzerland.
I've seen all sorts of odd phenomena in the elections of student unions and the ALP. They pale in comparison to this. What we already know about this Debian election is beyond bad.
Previous leaders have used their position to blackmail and humiliate victims and our families. The next person elected into the role is volunteering to inherit the legacy of toxic conflict. There are various police investigations and lawsuits in progress. Would any sane person really want to accept this role knowing the name of their family is going to be dragged into those disputes too?
Debianism now suffers from a disproportionate number of gays and transgenders. They have the Zizian mindset, in other words, they have tried to have stright white males molested and killed. They did that after my father died. So far, they failed. The next person to accept any leadership role in the group is inheriting all these vendettas.
I don't criticise the corruption in Debianism for the sake of it. It is necessary to call it out for all the people who currently suffer while other people take credit for our work. Some of the rogue Debianists are total imposters. When they remove the names of real Debian Developers and replace us with somebody's wife or girlfriend or an AI, that is plagiarism.
People are saying she is somebody's wife. Few details have been provided.
Look at how Phil Wyett waited seven years while his Debian Developer application was in limbo. He eventually got fed up and quit. Many other people quietly abandoned Debianism in similar circumstances without making a public comment.
Now look at the New Maintainer report for Sruthi Chandran. She applied to be listed as a Debian Developer in January 2019 and the process was completed in May 2019. Four months for Sruthi Chandran to have her name added to the credits as opposed to seven years for Phil Wyett to get nothing.
Sruthi Chandran received multiple messages from Indian men advocating her advancement. Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, who uses the pseudonym Pirate Praveen has written this advocacy:
I have sponsored almost all of her 200+ packages and also conducted packaging workshops with her.
There are reports about the trips they took together. Here is a report from 2019:
With Narmadh's help, we could start the function on time by bringing Mr. Praveen and Mrs. Sruthi from Palakkad Junction railway station.
They shared a photo:
Look at the Red Hat logo on Pirate Praveen's shirt. Is Debianism really a philosophical movement of some kind or is that a charade used to trick people into doing unpaid work beta-testing systemd?
Pirate Praveen was a candidate for the Indian Pirate Party. Is an Indian political party grooming a woman to be their stooge in Debianism? This is not a comment directed uniquely at the candidacy of Sruthi Chandran. Political parties actually do this type of thing all the time.
If anybody asks why somebody's wife, girlfriend or niece jumped the queue and was selected as a speaker at her first tech conference, the Debianists avoid the question and spread extreme lies about sexual harassment.
Sruthi regularly boasts about being first female Debian Developer in India. In a country with close to a billion people, it is worth asking why other Indian women don't volunteer. Is it because other Indian women have been smart enough to figure out the Debian "family" fallacy is a charade used to exploit people?
Recent blogs about the Debian pregnancy cluster tell the truth about women in Debianism.
When the first blog in the Debian pregnancy cluster series appeared, people were suspicious about the possibility that I was overstating the significance of this problem. Now we can see more than half the Debian women are either spouses or part of the transgender group.
When new women arrive at a conference they see the other women are all holding hands with their partners. The new women immediately understand what they have to do to get ahead in a group like this. Many women don't come to a second conference.
The leaked DebConf room lists take the story even further. Many of the Debian couples share rooms with other Debian couples. These couples are very intimate with each other and very rude to newcomers. Some people say it is like a student union. Other people call it a clique. Whatever you call it, it is not really Debian any more and it is definitely not real diversity.
Sruthi Chandran's platforms from previous elections do not contain any conflict of interest declarations.
- Election 2025 platform [Platform] [Overview, results]
- Election 2024 platform [Platform] [Overview, results]
- Election 2021 platform [Platform] [Overview, results]
- Election 2020 platform [Platform] [Overview, results]
She belatedly mentions her husband elsewhere, for example, in the Ada Lovelace Day interview.
I got introduced to the free software world and Debian through my husband. I attended many Debian events with him. During one such event, out of curiosity, I participated in a Debian packaging workshop.
Techrights expressed concerns about her relationships in a recent article:
When Debian wanted to stage a seemingly legitimate election it needed to have more than one candidate running; so eventually the female partner of a geek rose to the challenge (had no coding skills at all, no technical history in Debian) and lost to the "incumbent German".
The Techrights article alleges "no technical history" yet Sruthi Chandran is actually producing packages. It is important to clarify the extent of her personal contribution to those packages. As we saw with the notorious SSH package vulnerability, some package maintainers are simply cutting-and-pasting patches without understanding what they are looking at.
In 2018, DebConf was in Taiwan. A picture appeared of Lior Kaplan with his arm around one of the Albanian women. A few months later the same women had a job at GNOME.
In 2019, DebConf was in Brazil. My last intern from Google Summer of Code told me people pressured her to denounce me. She refused to get involved in gossip and dirty politics.
At the same conference, at the formal dinner, the two women sitting closest to the former Debian leader Chris Lamb are both from Albania. The woman closest to Lamb is Anisa Kuci. A few weeks later, she was given an Outreachy internship, followed by a job at Wikimedia Italia, giving her a residence permit. After people revealed details about men who dated her, she had to change jobs again and she is now at the GNOME Foundation. They are hiding her name and face.
At the same time this woman arrived in the GNOME foundation, they began denouncing a real developer, Sonny Piers.
This has been an awkward pattern in free software communities. Women with minimal or no technical experience are placed in a position of authority and they are used to denounce certain men.
At Easter in 2021, the misfits used Molly de Blanc to create and promote a highly offensive petition attacking a male volunteer, Dr Richard Stallman.
Based on these patterns, there is concern that if Sruthi Chandran is elected as leader of Debianism, the misfits will use her to spread gossip about Dr Richard Stallman or some other man, just as they used Molly de Blanc.
In April 2025, during the previous election, a huge thread appeared on the debian-vote mailing list with the subject line Why Debian is dying.
Talking about death and dying, Sruthi Chandran, the wife of a male developer who hides conflicts of interest submitted her nomination on Friday the 13th.
The voting period ends on 17 April, the 15th anniversary of Adrian von Bidder's death, which had been discussed like a copy-cat suicide.
Adrian's wife became the mayor of Basel, which seems to be a factor in the extraordinary amount of money, over $120,000, spent attacking my family and I.
For the dirty men who do censorship and blackmail conspiracies, they may see Sruthi Chandran, a woman, as the perfect front man. The dirty men can hide in the shadows while the leader pretends to be innocent and naive. In other words, if they think they can manipulate Sruthi such that she doesn't disrupt business-as-usual, they may well vote for her and let her feel she is in charge for a year.
In India, who cares if another white male commits suicide in Europe because they can't feed their family? Sruthi Chandran is one of the DebConf organisers. Together, Sruthi Chandran and Pirate Praveen Arimbrathodiyil recruited and wrote the advocacy emails for Abraham Raji before he became the first person to die at DebConf.
The best way to encourage people to nominate for the election will be for the existing leader, Andreas Tille, to withdraw all the privacy attacks, settle the lawsuits proactively and ensure the next leader can walk in and find the desk is clean ready to work on productive things.
Don't hold your breath waiting for transparency about these attacks on my family. There is still time to watch my video and contribute to the crowdfunding campaign. █