Gagging the Net

Kapil Sibal must be out of his mind. Or perhaps he’s just being what he is- A politician. Following some supposedly objectionable images of some Indian politicians being flashed on the internet, Mr Sibal has been demanding of the sites to remove the content. Not only that, he has asked the administrators of these sites to prevent future uploads of the similar variety. If the silver-haired gentleman can be smart enough to be the IT minister, he should know that the internet has always been full of ‘objectionable’ content. It depends on the perspective and the threshold of the person raising the objections. With thousands of gigabytes of content being transacted on the internet everyday, and with millions of users doing so, it is impossible to monitor the content of the internet. It is strictly user’s own discretion on what he or she prefers to access. At best, some sites offer links like ‘report abuse’ and ‘report as spam’ to objectionable content. Regarding personal insults to celebrities, the internet is full of such junk. There are hoards of people masquerading as important people on social networking sites. There is a plethora of obnoxious adult content made out of morphed images of well known cine actors. I am sure Mr Kapil Sibal must have been aware of all these things but he chose to act only when it came to objectionable images of politicians being flashed on the net. So is the law there to be invoked only when it is the turn of the politicians to bear the brunt of technology? And he had the audacity of saying that these images would have angered ‘all Indians’. All Indians, my foot. And perhaps realizing his folly of being seen as concerned only for the politicians, he was quick to add to his statement something that he knows drives the sentiment of the whole nation- religion. He added that there were objectionable images of Indian politicians and Indian Gods and Goddesses. But thankfully, the public did not bite the bait and Mr Kapil Sibal was quick to be reprimanded on the very platform he sought to put a gag on.  The social networking sites were flooded with posts ridiculing Kapil Sibal. Very rightly, the administrators of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google etc refused to reassure Sibal of preventing any future ‘objectionable’ material on their sites, because it is practically impossible to do so. If in the middle of this nice looking piece, if I were to say that Kapil Sibal is a @#$%$#@*, how would the blogger site know, let alone prevent this from being read? Internet is a tornado that Kapil Sibal is trying to stop with a flimsy canopy. It would have been alright if he had sought to track the perpetrator of the offensive posts through proper channel and subject him to the law, but seeking a blanket ban on certain sites, or expecting the administrators of these sites to continuously monitor their content for the sake of Indian politicians is a bit too much. I’m half-convinced that Mr Sharad Pawar threatened to pull NCP out of the UPA coalition unless Sibal did something about the internet being flooded with jokes about his slapping episode. Otherwise, I have always thought that Kapil Sibal himself was a man of reasonable sensibilities.