Clandestine Internet Censorship in India

nooyi86 writes "China and the Middle East block sites in order to suppress political or social dissent. Website blocking in India, on the other hand, is driven by national security-related paranoia, or hate speech that may lead to violence. The state must save its citizens from propaganda of both the extreme right and the extreme left. Shivam Vij has posted a comprehensive profile of Internet censorship in India."

Alternate link

[Skapare]

Here is an alternate link [tehelka.com] since it appears the original site has been emptied.

Article Text

[cyxxon]

Had trouble getting this, others obviously as well, so here it is.

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The Discreet Charms of the Nanny State
Published by Shivam Vij October 6th, 2006 in The Internet and bylines.

Books and films are banned as a result of protests when someone claims to be offended, but websites are blocked unilaterally, clandestinely by the government in its benign attempt to save you from propaganda of both the extreme left and the extreme right.

An edited version of this article by me has appeared in Tehelka.

On 29 June this year, the Department of Telecom of the Ministry of India's Communication and Information Technology asked some 150 Internet Servive Providers to block access to the website of the People's War Group, www.geocities.com/cpimlpwg. Exactly a month later, the DoT issues another letter informing ISPs that "M/S Yahoo! Inc." (which runs Geocities) had removed the PWG site anyway, and so all ISPs were requested to make sure that Geocities per se was not blocked.

This is the first time a provider of Internet services has agreed to the Indian government's demand of completely removing a particular website, thus establishing a dangerous precedent. Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft do this regularly for China and other countries, with the difference that it is public knowledge there, and these companies come under attack from free speech activists the world over.

It is curious as to what made Yahoo! Change its mind about India: in 2003 they had refused the India's demand to remove a mailing list run on Yahoo! Groups by a banned militant outfit, the Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC), a militant outfit of the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya.

The terms and conditions of these online services - which no one reads - clearly say that they may terminate their services on requests by law enforcement or other government agencies without prior notice.

On 15 May 2006, the Maoist website www.peoplesmarch.com was deleted by their hosting company on the request of the Indian government. Not that it has made much of a difference to them: they're now at http://peoplesmarch.googlepages.com/ [googlepages.com] whose homepage asserts their right to free speech and condemns India's censorship attempts. So how long before this site gets blocked too? To be sure they have put up all their content on http://peoplesmarch.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com] as well. Planning to block this one too? They have the content stored somewhere on their hard disk and they'll put it up on a thousand free sites. There's also http://naxalrevolution.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] and many more.

The most illustrative case of Internet censorship in India is that of Hinduunity.org, which, though run from the US by one Rohit Vyasmaan, claims to be the official website of the Bajrang Dal. The Hindu Unity site posts anti-Muslim hate speech, creative interpretation of Qur'anic verses and most famously, a "hit list" of those who it says are against Hindus. The hit list has on it not just leftist columnists but also people and organisations who in India would be regarded as being somewhat sympathetic to Hindutva. Lalu Prasad Yadav is listed for "swindling Gau-chara's money"!

In 2001, the site's then host in the US, Addr.com, received complaints about the site. Vyasmaan told Addr.com that his site did not advocate violence, but they shut down the site anyway for its very obvious hate speech. As it happened, Hinduunity.org was then rescued by Rabbi Meir's Kahane group, a banned Zionist organisation in the US. Hinduunity now advocates "Hindu militancy" on its site, and heavily aligns with the anti-Palestine cause. No wonder it is block in countries of the Middle East as well.

Hinduunity.org was first blocked by India in 2004, when the NDA was in power and when the site was calling Atal Bihari Vajpayee names for 'catching the pseudo-secularism bug'. Curiously, in July 2006 the DoT again asked for

Re:Not necessarily bad

[aquiltar]

Yes, but someone Jewish or Muslim might see Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Orthodox Unitarian and Quaker as being nearly the same. And will you deny that Christian sects don't feel some kind of unity as Christians versus non-Christians, us versus them? There are sects and castes among Hindus too, and if you really want me to draw an analogy between the sects of Christianity and those of Hinduism (and the intra-religious conflicts), I will. But people don't tout the government representation of various sects as some kind of diversity. America is about 80% Christian, 1% Jewish, 10% other. The religious conflict in the country is mostly about anti-Islam and anti-Judaism -- both groups are in a severe minority, and Muslims are in a power-minority, and you _don't_ see people commiting arson and murder out of religious hate. 80% of Indians are Hindu, but there is a 14% Muslim population, with a strong history of Hindu-Muslim conflict. The fact that India has a Muslim president when there are religious riots on a very regular basis is hence a lot more significant than a Jew taking on a comparable post in the US.