July 20, 2006 | In Technology, Politics |
India has taken a great step towards increased censorship and restriction of free expression on the internet. The country’s Ministry of Communications recently ordered 17 blogs and websites blocked on the grounds that they contained “religious hatred.”
The government claimed that the sites in question accused Muslim terror groups of being behind the recent train bombings in the coastal city of Bombay. The list includes a number of conservative American blogs, including exposingtheleft.blogspot.com, which expresses somewhat controversial views about politics in the Middle East and the U.S. government’s “war on terror.”
ISPs have not only complied with the order, but blocked entire domains, including blogspot.com and others, sending shock waves through the Indian blogsphere.
It’s easy enough to get around the blocks using services like pkblogs.com, but it’s not so easy for Indians to get past the fact that their government has joined the ranks of China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, disallowing citizens from expressing their opinions in peace.
“If this isn’t censorship, I don’t know what is”, wrote on blogger by the name of Neha Viswanathan, noting that the specifically targeted websites merely express controversial and often unpopular opinions – not unlike the majority of free-thinking writers on the internet. There is no evidence whatsoever that any of the sites were promoting any actual violence against Muslims or anyone else.
This leads me to believe that the 17 sites in question were targeted at random, as an excuse to launch an assault on the blogsphere in general. Just as the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada are doing, Indian authorities are using the problem of terrorism to their advantage in imposing their own controlling agenda on supposedly “free” citizens.
Whether freedom of speech and expression in India will be able to survive this outrageous attack depends largely on the determination of the country’s citizens and their ability to speak out against oppression.
