The current mechanisms of internet censorship inIndia [ Images ]are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny, says Shivam Vij
Recent debates on internet censorship inIndiahave focussed on the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don't apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth.
It has been said that the internet can be used to incite violence, particularly inter-communal violence, and there needs to be a mechanism to prevent that. Communications Minister Kapil Sibal [ Images ] wants internet giants to "self-regulate" for this reason, denying that he wants to censor political dissent on the internet. On the heels of his expression of such concern in December 2011,Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi and journalist Vinay Rai filed cases against various internet companies for similar material that is religiously offensive.
It needs to be pointed out, however, that the cases filed by Qasmi and Rai are under the Indian Penal Code and do not even invoke the Information Technology Act. So if the Indian Penal Code can be used against religiously offensive material, why do we need any new mechanism to "regulate" or even "self-regulate" the internet?
Since even before the internet became important enough for Indian courts, government departments and agencies to ask American internet companies to remove content, the government has had another mechanism in place: asking internet service providers or ISPs to block a webpage. They did so informally by blocking
Imagine a situation when you don't even know of books or films that are banned -- the public cannot even debate the rights and wrongs of such censorship because we don't even know what is censored on the Indian web. We are in that situation and it beats me why we are not angry about it. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder: when the government has been blocking webpages it thinks are not suitable for Indians to view, why do we need new and additional laws or 'mechanisms' to tackle allegedly "offensive" material on the web?
Okay, so ISP-level blocking can be easily bypassed using "anonymiser" websites and software. That is not a problem for the Indian government either, as it has been informally asking big internet companies to remove content for years and, guess what, these companies have been complying. To give but one example, on February 15, 2011, Dalit groups in Mumbai [ Images ] protested against a Facebook page titled 'I Hate Ambedkar'. A group of around 400-500 people pelted stones and burnt tyres. By evening the police had acquired an order from a magistrate's court in Bandra to ask Facebook to removed a defaced photo of B R Ambedkar from the page, and also that the page be blocked inIndia. As I read news reports of the protest that night, sitting inDelhi [ Images ], I tried to find the Facebook page in question. It had already been taken off or blocked or both.
There were many such cases of allegedly defamatory or inflammatory content in Orkut inMaharashtra [ Images ]in 2006-07, involving, unsurprisingly, Bal Thackeray [ Images ], Chhatrapati Shivaji and Ambedkar. This resulted in Maharashtra police's cyber crime cell establishing a hotline with Orkut whereby the latter promised to "block those 'forums' and 'communities' that contain 'defamatory or inflammatory content' but also provide the IP addresses from which such content has been generated," according to a report in theEconomic Times.
Shocking as it sounds, this has been happening for some years now, and not only in Maharashtra but acrossIndia. Any representative of the Indian government writes to Google to remove, say, a YouTube video, and they may comply with it, and even the person who created/uploaded that video doesn't know that the government got it removed! We don't know what these pieces of removed content are, so we can't debate whether in those cases the Indian Constitution's Fundamental Right to free speech was violated or whether its reasonable restrictions prevailed in letter and spirit. Nevertheless, it still brings us to the question: if the government already has had such mechanisms in place, why do we need new rules and regulations?
Nobody can disagree that popular social networking websites are often used to defame, abuse or threaten people. We have all seen that on the internet. However, not only does the Indian government and law have enough ways to deal with it -- as showed above -- it is also not the case that these internet companies do not exercise "self-regulation". All major social networking sites give users options to report content that is offensive, amounts to hate speech, incites violence, is pornographic and so on. While reporting such, you are often asked to cite the reason.
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India's skewed internet censorship debate