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As usual, Kapil and his crooked cronies trying desperately but failing at the lipstick on the pig approach instead of recognising this as a symptom of a much deeper problem. This is what happens when a country allows illiterates and career criminals to become national leaders.
Are these the Sibbaline Oracles?
Oh, how sweet and concerned Karan Thappad is!
Readers could get diabetes just reading it!
Free speech in India is defined pretty much the same way “secularism” is. Everything that offends the majority Hindus is permissible. Anything that hurts the minority “feelings” is not. And we can never, ever make fun of the Congress party heads even though a number of them have engaged in possible criminal activity.
The fact that MMS and his ministers think that, amidst rampant corruption, and a looming economic slowdown, that comments on facebook are the most important issues of the day speaks to how totally out of touch they are with reality.
Before any of these over 50 ministers seek to curtail individual expression, they need to realize that the youth who constitute a sizable percentage of population don’t regard free speech as a privilege bestowed on them by the higher powers of congress, but a birth right which is inviolable.
Excerpts from Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen:
“In India, the new ‘Intermediary Guidelines’ Rules and the Cyber Cafe Rules that have been in effect since April 2011 give not only the government, but all citizens of India, great powers to censor the Internet. These rules, which were made by the Department of Information Technology and not by the Parliament, require that all intermediaries remove content that is ‘disparaging’, ‘relating to… gambling’, ‘harm minors in any way’, to which the user ‘does not have rights’. When was the last time you checked wither you had ‘rights’ to a joke before forwarding it? Did you share a Twitter message containing the term “#IdiotKapilSibal”, as thousands of people did a few days ago? Well, that is ‘disparaging’, and Twitter is required by the new law to block all such content. The government of Sikkim can run advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers, but under the new law it cannot do so online. As you can see, through these ridiculous examples, the Intermediary Guidelines are very badly thought-out and their drafting is even worse. Worst of all, they are unconstitutional, as they put limits on freedom of speech that contravene Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution, and do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and fairness.
Excessive Censoring by Internet Companies
We, at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, decided to test the censorship powers of the new rules by sending frivolous complaints to a number of intermediaries. Six out of seven intermediaries removed content, including search results listings, on the basis of the most ridiculous complaints. The people whose content was removed were not told, nor was the general public informed that the content was removed. If we hadn’t kept track, it would be as though that content never existed. Such censorship existed during Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union. Not even during the Emergency has such censorship ever existed in India. Yet, not only was what the Internet companies did legal under the Intermediary Guideline Rules, but if they had not, they could have been punished for content put up by someone else. That is like punishing the post office for the harmful letters that people may send over post.
Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors
Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for ‘government criticism’. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.“