ONLINE CENSORSHIP Status Update? Bad Assailed from all sides, does the UPA really hope to recover its 'image' by muzzling online dissent?
Kapil Sibal ko gussa kyon aata hai? Butt of online jokes: Politicians in 'tweaked' cinematic avatars. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. The UPA government has made it something of a fine art. Hardly had the ruckus over the decision to open up the retail sector to FDI died down than IT and communications minister Kapil Sibal unleashed another storm. A New York Timesblogpost last fortnight revealed that the Indian government has been trying for some time now to get representatives of firms like Google and Facebook to remove "offensive" content from their sites. It relates to material, the government says, that could be exploited to foment religious riots. "We are seeking their cooperation, and if somebody is not willing to cooperate on incendiary material, it is the duty of government to think of steps that we need to take," Sibal said at a press conference called hurriedly on December 6, the morning after the revelations.
Gulshan Rai, director general of CERT-In, India's key internet monitor, voices another 'official' view. Companies like Google and Facebook, he thinks, are just using the freedom of expression clause as a ruse. "They remove links related to child pornography and pre-natal sex selection, don't they? The real reason they are refusing to take such content off is because they generate hits and revenue," he says. The government's suggestion is just an attempt to get these firms to self-regulate. "They aren't doing so currently," says Rai. He claims he receives several complaints but has no time to trawl through hundreds of millions of pages on the net. Few, though, are buying the government's argument that content on social media is about to incite communal violence in any real sense. Nivedita Menon, a professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University and an active commentator on the blog Kafila, doesn't hold back her punches. "The Congress always uses the cover of communal violence when it actually wants to consolidate its fragmented support," she says. "There are some serious independent Left voices online that express dissent to government policy, such as Sanhati, Kafila et al—that voice is the real target."
That political criticism, indeed even puerile cartoons, is what has got the government's goat is evident from Google's transparency report, a periodic list of censorship requests from governments. Between January and June this year, when Anna's campaign was gathering online steam, the Indian government asked Google to snip as many as 358 items from its sites. Of these, 255 requests fell not under hate speech or defamation, but under Google's "government criticism" category. Would the government still have us believe that its attempt to regulate online content is an attempt to stem religious riots? Many who use the open, liberal space of the internet are warning how India could find itself on a slippery undemocratic slope if varying offended constituencies are appeased one after another. "Offensive and abusive are very vague terms," says Rahul Roushan, founder-cum-editor, Faking News, a leading satire site in India. "I can't file an FIR against a person who abuses me verbally. When we can't censor people in the real world, why are we losing sleep over trying to censor online content?"
*** Pre-Screen This: Sibal Rants About Online Abuse
What About Offline Violence On Our Screens?
*** While many are concerned about the impending censorship, an equal number think any shot at effectively regulating cyberspace is doomed to fail. What if an offensive site is hosted on a server located outside India, something that exempts it from Indian legal jurisdiction? Any attempt at blocking the IP address of a savvy enough site will inevitably result in mirror sites or clones, set up on different IP addresses. This was best demonstrated by those who helped Wikileaks survive despite coordinated attempts, including by the US government, to bring it down. Besides, any blogger persecuted by the state is likely to become a hero, like Razan Ghazzawi did in Syria. Such censorship will also end up placing India in an embarrassing league of internet predators like China and Iran. "If you get rid of sites that say bad things about you today, tomorrow there will be another 100 sites saying bad things about you. This is not because they want to but simply because you shut down the ones that said it in the first place," says a well-known parodist who writes under the pseudonym of Fake Jhunjhunwala. And what pre-empts riots from breaking out if some loony American pastor posts blasphemous stuff on a little known site? In fact, it was foreigners who had posted most of the pictures included in the government's offensive religious set. Ironically, these kind of images are now likely to find even more viewership as more people post them—and are drawn to them—because of the sudden attention cast on them.
With free space already limited, the internet is a refuge for many who see it as the only, even if somewhat controlled, healthy space for dissent and critique. Some will further argue that the net is also more democratic when compared to the print and electronic media, a medium that allows opposing views to naturally balance each other out. "For every Rama Sene supporter, there is a Pink Chaddi campaigner," says Menon. As for every site of ultra-nationalist outpouring, there is a left-wing blog. On the other hand, Roushan feels that Indians are still getting used to the internet. "Give it time. Users will mature; so will those currently losing sleep over online content," he says.
Sibal has already burnt his fingers with statements like the controversial one on there being "zero loss" to the exchequer due to 2G or his airport tryst with Baba Ramdev. Soon after he plunged into the latest row, people began putting up "Sibal is an idiot" status messages on Facebook in reaction to a protest call by a blogger on Kafila. Karthika Nair, a poet and dance producer, went a step ahead, posting: "Kapil Sibal is an idiot with power, which is what makes him so dangerous." Like it or not, new media gives a lot of leeway to personalised critique. The best response to it, perhaps, is not to offer reasons for it.
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