The Indian government's decision to block 18 websites including the popular blogging site blogspot.com increasingly appears to be a whimsical and arbitrary one. The loud rumours rife in the online world about the government blocking sites in the wake of the July 11 Mumbai blasts is increasingly ringing a hollow tune. None of the listed sites that this writer visited had anything to do with the Mumbai blasts.
The department of information technology on July 13 had ordered Internet service providers (ISPs) to block 18 sites. The directive issued by the licensing and registration cell of the ministry said: "Request you to kindly initiate blocking of the following websites/blogspot immediately." It did not mention any reason for the request.
The blacklist came from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) which is supposed to be responsible for Indian interweb security, and also oversees Internet censorship under a clause that seeks to ensure "balanced flow of information." Websites can be blocked if they contain "pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism". None of the sites that have been blocked do any of this.
It is not just the block-it decision that defies reason, the decision to block the entire Google-owned blogspot.com domain just to obstruct a few subdomains makes it obvious that the ones in charge have little clue how to go about blocking websites. In October 2003 when the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government wanted to ban an obscure email forum called Kynhun (run by a Khasi militant outfit Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council – HNLC) hosted on yahoogroups.com, ISPs blocked access to all groups hosted on the yahoo.com domain.
According to a Press Trust of India (PTI) report, over the past six years, the ministry has blocked more than 100 Websites. It is for the first time that such a large number of Websites have been blocked at one go. Usually, one or two sites are blocked at a time.
According to a report in the Daily News & Analysis (DNA), an official of the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) said he had received a 22-page list of websites to be blocked from the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which falls under the ministry of information technology as well.
Deepak Maheshwari, secretary, Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) admitted that the association had received the instructions from the government. "The instructions have been received from the government and the sites have been blocked accordingly," Maheshwari said.
"The Centre's decision to block some blogs and Websites in the wake of last week's serial blasts in Mumbai is neither desirable nor feasible," Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said in Chennai on Tuesday. "The Internet should be a free media. Any attempts to block out some Websites is not desirable. If you stop the media, rumours float very fast and it is not desirable," he said.
Though on the face of it the government's decision to block the Websites is not a direct attack on freedom of expression (it would certainly have been had sites been targetted specifically for expressing views), what the government has ended up doing is actually affect thousands of people from expressing their opinion – through their blogs. The attack on freedom of expression is more by default than by design.
Not without reason, the ones who are furious with the government's decision are bloggers, most of whom have blogs on blogspot.com, fewer on typepad.com. Peter Griffin, the man behind the Mumbai Help blog told the Statesman that it was a “silly ban” that cannot be imposed on Internet. “It’s a ban ordered by clueless politicians who have no idea how the Internet works, passed on by clueless bureaucrats to clueless technical staff at ISPs. The government should have informed people by telling them the reasons behind banning a blog.”
"Indian ISPs don't have the technology to block individual name servers – say a particular blog hosted on blogspot.com. So they had no choice but to block the root servers of major blogging networks – blogspot, geocities and typepad," a senior official in the IT ministry told Hindustan Times. So much for Indian ISPs' state-of-the-art techonogies.
Nikhil Pahwa, who blogs on mixedbag. blogspot.com, reacted, "The government action reeks of lack of both insight and foresight: there are workarounds for such bans, and if terrorists do want to use blogs, they can still post using www.blogger.com; and lack of foresight, because how could they ever expect this large Indian blogging community to stay silent about the blockage? Frankly, it is unilateral and undemocratic, and typical of governmental efficiency (an oxymoron, if you please)."
More than 40,000 bloggers who identify India as their country of origin are hosted on blogspot.com. Many them have already migrated to other blogging sites like wordpress.com and livejournal.com. A group called BloggersCollective has been formed, and there are many who want to take recourse to the Right to Information Act to grill the government about its whimsical and artibrary decision. And of course, find out more about the decision which defies all logic.
A report in Hindustan Times said the circular was originally issued by the ministry of home affairs. Officials defended the decision saying, "We would like those people to come forward who access these radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."
These officials, however, would find it difficult to justify themselves. princesskimberly.blogspot.com has two inconsequential posts of a "bored woman" and was lust updated in March 2004. commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com has two as well and, hold on, are in Mandarin. Both pajamaseditor.blogspot.com and exposingtheleft.blogspot.com are American anti-left blogs. No, it doesn't make sense. And true, no one in India will miss these four blogs.
Highly placed sources in the information technology ministry, however, clarified to NDTV.com that the decision had nothing to do with the Mumbai blasts, but was an attempt to curb religious extremism on the Web. If one looks at the content of just these few blogspot.com blogs, however, it is impossible to buy the official argument. None of the other sites mentioned in the list express extreme religious views either though some may seem offensive. That's all.
Incidentally, the other major site that has been blocked is geocities.com, owned by Yahoo. This site hosts a number of homepages of Indian militant organisations like the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the United National Liberation Front (UNLF). These homepages have been there on geocities.com for more than 7-8 years.
The decision to block websites is being seen as an attempt to regulate the Internet, and comparisons are being drawn to China. Ironically, both Google and Yahoo, whose sites have been blocked in India, are the ones who have been working hand-in-glove with the Chinese government and have been repeatedly condemned by free expresison groups for helping Chinese autorities clamp down on dissident journalists and writers.
The comparison with China is not unjustifiable, and not for the reasons that are being cited. On the face of it, the Indian government seems to have created an issue out of a non-issue (the sites given in the list are not worth anyone's trouble). But see this in the light of the Broadcast Services Regulation Bill 2006, and you will get a different picture. The Bill provides that the government may at any time direct the licensing authority (Broadcasting Regulatory Authority of India) to suspend or revoke a broadcasting service’s licence, if the service is “considered prejudicial to friendly relations with a foreign country, public order, communal harmony or security of the state.”
It is the security angle which is cause for concern because the government gets the unfettered right to use it as a ruse and regulate content the way it wants. This clause, sources say, made it to the draft Bill at the insistence of the ministry of home affairs. And it is the same ministry which seems to be behind the website-ban decision as well.
[ It is possible that the list given out is only a decoy. The idea could have been to ban other sites in its real target list. That way you can ban inconsequential sites, get the other sites concerned too banned in the bargain, and not be criticised for cracking down on free speech because at worst people would call you dunces. That would be fine because the purpose of banning certain target sites would have actually worked. But that is just a theory. ]
Prima facie the government's decision to block the websites does not appear to be a deep-rooted conspiracy to curb freedom of expression. It is just the fall-out of a dim-witted decision of a bureaucrat who hasn't the faintest idea how the Internet works. But, to reiterate, see it in the light of the Broadcast Bill and you will know that the concerted assault on freedom of expression in India may begin any day now.
