India is not China

While China today stands for nothing that defines a modern society - freedom of the individual, freedom of speech and freedom of expression, the Government of India and the upper judiciary of India have realized that with their browbeating and bullying, at least they get the job done.

In such a politically important time as this when the millions of poor and the needy in this country continue to live in poverty and malnutrition but are enraged at the kind of muck that is being hosted on facebook or google, the people in power are at least doing something about one of the above two problems.

So while I am critical of all the western media groups and websites and businesses that preach freedom of speech everywhere but bend over backwards on those principles in order to do business in India, I agree with what the counsel for Google India told the Honourable Delhi High Court - India is not China.

Google India, which along with 20 websites is facing criminal case for allegedly hosting objectionable material, on Monday told the Delhi High Court that blocking them was not an option as a democratic India does not have a “totalitarian” regime like China.

“The issue relates to a constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression and suppressing it was not possible as the right to freedom of speech in democratic India separates us from a totalitarian regime like China,” advocate N.K. Kaul, appearing for Google India, told Justice Suresh Kait.

The biggest strengths of Google or Facebook today are its ability to connect people from all across the globe into one community. Freedom of the internet is a forgone conclusion for most of us, but then like so many other occasions, we must realize that there are absolute idiots roaming our streets or sitting in the highest offices of power who may never have opened a site and looked at the 'objectionable content', nor the 'objectionable content' will make any difference to their sorry little lives, but will take it upon themselves to free the society of the scourge of hate speech.

When I use the term hate speech, I am doing them a favour, because as far as I know, the Government of India is pissed only because now finally people have the guts to call out Sonia Gandhi for the dirty, greedy, secretive politician she is.

According to the New York Times, in October 2011, HRD minister Kapil Sibal called internet service providers to protest a Facebook page maligning Sonia Gandhi. Following another meeting in November, on December 5, 2011, Sibal called Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and others to proclaim that "the Indian government doesn't believe in censorship. It believes in self-regulation". But his request from the service providers was Herculean. They were to create a mechanism to identify and, perforce, excise "inflammatory" and "defamatory" material. The service providers were to be simultaneously regulators and spies.

All "objectionable" and "controversial" matter was to be reported to the government. In full form at a press conference on December 6, 2011, Sibal expressed a responsibility "to take care of the sensibilities of the people... (because) cultural ethos is very important to us". The IT ministry was now the cultural ministry. This expanded universe of threatened censorship was clear. Sibal's broad concerns were about defamation, obscenity and offending religious sensitivities, or were they? The websites took the view that they would not prescreen material. Sibal was positively threatening: "If you do not co-operate, we will have to take action".

In January 2012, the Delhi High Court was asked to stay criminal proceedings against Facebook India and Google India. The case itself was astonishing. A complaint was filed by Vinay Rai under the obscenity and other provisions of the Indian Penal Code. What the trial court did next was to summon representatives from 21 sites including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube. This was an extraordinary summons on an ambiguous complaint, about allegedly derogatory articles, asking these providers to submit to censorship in respect of free speech exercised by others through a pipeline they provided, but over the contents of which the providers had no control. The summons took place after the Metropolitan Magistrate had examined four witnesses and the Delhi Police affirmed the authenticity of the information. This was clearly enough to conquer the cyber world.

India represents a great conundrum in this regard. Indians have fanned out in the entire world as honest, hard working and well qualified Information technology professionals while the governance systems of this country are still far far away from even understanding how the same IT can change the entire way we work and live for the better. This is another great example of the grandiose image that politicians of power have of themselves.

The pendulum swings both ways, and with millions and millions of individuals of all genders, races, languages and genes access the same sites, there will be billions of thoughts, ideas, images and words that will be exchanged and viewed. While there will be many pages on Facebook, for example, praising India,  there will be many that will be spewing bile against it. Those that access the internet probably access only a few percentage points of it, and have learnt to ignore the rest, but as history tells us, particularly so the recent history of India, that there are many idiots out there roaming our streets or sitting in the offices of power who believe that it us up to them to save us from the scourge of opinions that they don't believe in.

In our overly sensitive and touchy modern India, we see such examples all the time. There was a time when Shiv Sena idiots beat up Cyber Cafe owners because somebody had written things online about Shivaji that weren't showing him in a glowing light. Since the internet is not a physical thing, nor can they attack the servers sitting in various parts of the world, they attack the nearest thing connected to the internet to vent their frustration.

If such hate sites, even if against Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, or whatever, had the ability to sway public opinion, I could imagine an ever-devious politician would be pricking his or her ears and listening to what its saying, but as far as I can see, a hate site against India really hasn't rankled me or anybody around me anytime. But the fact remains that with billions of opinions out there on the internet, there will be millions that one find objectionable, and when it comes to the internet, once again, we ignore them, or go to a chat site or a forum and create our own good rebuttal!

But I am talking sense in a situation which makes absolutely no sense at all. The Delhi High Court is warning these sites that they will not hesitate to do a China based on the case filed by a Mr. Vinay Rai, a journalist by profession and now a crusader of internet cleansing.

Acting on a complaint by Vinay Rai, the trial court had earlier summoned the representatives of 21 social networking sites, including those of Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Youtube. It had directed the centre to take "immediate appropriate steps" and file a report on January 13.

The complaint has been filed under Section 292 (sale of obscene books etc), 293 (sale of obscene objects to young person etc) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC.

A civil judge had last month ordered the social networking sites to remove all "anti-religious" or "anti-social" contents by February 6, 2012.

So a civil judge ordered these 21 sites with billions of combined users, probably trillions of pages and many trillions of accumulated comments and views, to clear all that they find objectionable within a few weeks. Vinay Rai's interview with the Wall Street Journal sheds some light on what is driving this man to be the great online crusader, and he says that he does not have a facebook account but it's his readers who keep him informed of objectionable material. Considering its an Urdu newspaper he edits, I am assuming a lot of objections then will have to do with sites and pages that are critical of Islam, and considering that this is such a politically important time, it is in the government's immediate interest to show the Muslim community that is stands by them. They may not be able to build schools for them or try harder to integrate them into the national, secular society, but like I said, at least it is taking care of one of their biggest problems - that of objectionable internet content.

As a Supreme Court lawyer writes in the India Today article I quoted in the beginning,

 The Congress has a long history of muzzling the press as in the cases of Sakal (1962) and Bennett and Coleman (1973), the Emergency (1975-77), the Indian Express case (1986), and the Defamation Bill 1988 among others. It seems to get paranoid when its leaders are portrayed in bad light or lampooned. The Congress should play big brother for the poor and not be so obsessed about attacks on its leaders in the name of cultural ethos. Ominously on Friday, the 13th of this month, the government sanctioned a pervasive criminal proceeding because the content of websites was against national interest. Have they been taking lessons from China?

Its disappointing, to say the least, to see the courts of this country stand up for the shenanigans of the nation's shameless government. The internet entered India's mainstream over a decade ago, and millions of Indians are online in various forms and capacities, and the timing of the Government's zealous fox-hunt tells me that it is nothing but a case of voter appeasement. Over the past years, the Government of India has behaved not like the government of a nation that aims to be a power, but as a unit that is shameless and brazen in its rape of the national treasury, but at the same time highly insecure about its image, bristling at even a hint of criticism and thoroughly incapable and unwilling to lead this nation.

Patralekha Chatterjee in The Asian Age makes a very valid point that this is a hogwash because the government, and the society in general, has always shied away from going after the real causes of our social division and collective rage. Who regulates the matrimonial sites who promote caste based marriages? why aren't Khaps told to change their ways and move out of the centuries old feudal mindset? Why are we not enraged as a society at crimes against women and children?

Unfortunately, like I have said many times before, tough problems need tough responses, and I simply do not believe if our society has the strength, but more importantly the inclination, to come together and work towards a better social structure. Its money and affluence that drives today's India, and since our government is an outcome of the same society, it can't be expected to, and won't, do what the society doesn't want it to do.