The Great Indian Love Affair With Censorship

[Deltacamelately]

Captain LT, you would be right in doing so

India asks Internet giants to censor the web


India has urged social network companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google to remove offensive material, unleashing a storm of criticism from Internet users complaining of censorship in the world's largest democracy.

Telecoms and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal met executives from Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Monday to ask them to screen content, but no agreement with the companies was reached, he said.

Sibal denied he was promoting censorship but said some of the images and statements on social media risked fanning tensions in India, which has a long history of deadly religious violence. He said the firms had rebuffed earlier calls to take action.

Socially conservative India already censors some films and books considered obscene or likely to stoke religious conflict.

The country of 1.2 billion people created new rules earlier this year obliging Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticized at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

It was not clear if Sibal was proposing stiffer regulation, but Law Minister Salman Khurshid later said his colleague was calling for dialogue about offensive content, not censorship.

A New York Times report Monday that said Sibal called executives about six weeks ago and showed them a Facebook page that maligned ruling Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi and told them it was "unacceptable."

The government is very sensitive to criticism of Gandhi, whose family has dominated Indian politics since before independence from the British and has lost two prominent figures to assassination.

Officials are often keen to be seen as protectors of the family. Last year there were moves to block the English translation of a Spanish novel about Sonia Gandhi's life.

"We have to take care of the sensibilities of our people, we have to protect their sensibilities. Our cultural ethos is very important to us," Sibal said Tuesday, after showing reporters some images he said were taken from the Internet and would likely offend religious communities.

Sibal said his ministry was working on guidelines for action against companies which did not respond to the government's requests, but did not specify what action could be taken.

"We'll certainly evolve guidelines to ensure that such blasphemous material is not part of content on any platform."

Despite the rules in place, India's Internet access is largely unrestricted, in contrast to tight controls in fellow Asian economic powerhouse China. But in line with many other governments around the world, India has become increasingly edgy about the power of social media.

India's bloggers and Twitter users scorned the minister's proposals, saying a prefiltering system would limit free expression and was impossible to implement. The phrase #IdiotKapilSibal was one of India's most tweeted Tuesday.

"The idea of prescreening is impossible. How will they do it? . . . There is no technology currently that determines whether content is 'defamatory' or 'offensive'," India-based cyber security expert Vijay Mukhi told Reuters.

TAKEN ABACK

The New York Times report, which Sibal did not confirm or deny, was the focus of much of the online anger directed at the minister Tuesday.

"I love Sonia Gandhi. She is awesome. She is God. And never wrong about anything, ever." (This msg is approved by Kapil Sibal's cyber cell)," posted twitter user Sorabh Pant.

Indian authorities were taken aback in the summer by an anti-corruption campaign that multiplied on Facebook and Twitter, drawing tens of thousands of people to street protests and forcing the government to agree to new anti-graft laws.

Last year, as part of a broader electronic security crackdown, Indian security agencies demanded access to communications sent through highly secure BlackBerry devices of Canadian smartphone maker Research In Motion RIMM.O.

RIM gave India access to its consumer services, including its Messenger services, but said it could not allow monitoring of its enterprise email.

Facebook said in a statement it recognized the government's wish to minimize the amount of offensive content on the web. The California-based company said it removes content that violates company rules on nudity and inciting violence and hatred.

Internet search giant Google, which owns social networking site Orkut and video-sharing site YouTube, also said it already removes content when it is illegal or against its own policy.

"But when content is legal and doesn't violate our policies, we won't remove it just because it's controversial, as we believe that people's differing views, so long as they're legal, should be respected and protected," the company said in a statement.

Yahoo India declined to comment, as did Microsoft's Indian public relations agency.

India now has 100 million Internet users, less than a tenth of the country's population of 1.2 billion. It is the third-largest user base behind China and the United States. It is seen swelling to 300 million users in the next three years.

During last year's clampdown, officials also said Google and Skype would be sent notices to set up local servers to allow full monitoring of email and messenger communications.

Britain also faced criticism last month for considering curbs on social media after recent riots even as Foreign Secretary William Hague castigated countries that block the Internet to stifle protests.

© Copyright (c) Reuters
India asks Internet giants to censor the web

Freedom of expression is a slippery terminology. However, censoring social networking sites isn't going to help anyway.

[Double Edge]

I think he has been inspired by the very restrictive and punitive censorship laws now close to being passed in the US.

What US censorship law ?

First he will declare a impossible to enforce code of conduct given the sheer scale of social network data.
Then once it is shown as ineffective the Government will introduce a harsh censorship law saying that code of conducts were being ignored and so on.

I think the govts goal is to be able to apprehend anybody that posts something deemed offensive. This was the motive behind the Blackberry fracas some time back. The laws are blind to the medium being used. A tv channel or newspaper is consequently more at risk of being taken to task than an anonymous internet user. This is the gap the govt is trying to bridge.

They can partially accomplish this goal if they increase logging capability at the lcoal ISP's end as well as getting overseas service providers to do the same. This i guess was the point of meeting the executives from the various internet companies earlier. They singled out the biggies.

The goal is to create an audit tral so they can possibly identify the creator of a post considered 'harmful to the public interest'. They will then try to subpoaena the logs from the various providers and attempt to identify who made the post. They essentially want more tracking.

Failing that they just want offensive content to be taken down. One guest on a show yesterday was talking about sending fraudlent (ie legal letters with no locus standi whatsoever) to numerous sites and the majority complied without any objection. No prosecution but objective accomplished.

The internet is the last truly free public medium left in the world. Looks like its days are nearly over.

I doubt there will be censorship but there will be a risk attached to making any offensive posts so the result they are hoping for is self-censorship.

But there are so many places on the net to post, that it will be difficult to implement.

Internet has managed to survive in more restrictive countries, savvy chinese internet users do not seem to be overly affected as they know about work arounds. Who talks about the great Chinese internet firewall these days. Few years ago it was all the rage.

That info is very easily available and if they force people they will be indirectly encouraging them to learn how to subvert these controls just as in China or any other restrictive country.

[bolo121]

What US censorship law ?

Google SOPA and you will come to know. They are giving content providers and government huge powers that can easily be misused.

I think the govts goal is to be able to apprehend anybody that posts something deemed offensive. This was the motive behind the Blackberry fracas some time back. The laws are blind to the medium being used. A tv channel or newspaper is consequently more at risk of being taken to task than an anonymous internet user. This is the gap the govt is trying to bridge.

They can partially accomplish this goal if they increase logging capability at the lcoal ISP's end as well as getting overseas service providers to do the same. This i guess was the point of meeting the executives from the various internet companies earlier. They singled out the biggies.

The goal is to create an audit tral so they can possibly identify the creator of a post considered 'harmful to the public interest'. They will then try to subpoaena the logs from the various providers and attempt to identify who made the post. They essentially want more tracking.

Failing that they just want offensive content to be taken down. One guest on a show yesterday was talking about sending fraudlent (ie legal letters with no locus standi whatsoever) to numerous sites and the majority complied without any objection. No prosecution but objective accomplished.

That is effectively censorship. It would be very easy for government to track and muzzle any person exposing their misdeeds once they have laws that allow them to collect such data

I doubt there will be censorship but there will be a risk attached to making any offensive posts so the result they are hoping for is self-censorship.

But there are so many places on the net to post, that it will be difficult to implement.

Internet has managed to survive in more restrictive countries, savvy chinese internet users do not seem to be overly affected as they know about work arounds. Who talks about the great Chinese internet firewall these days. Few years ago it was all the rage.

That info is very easily available and if they force people they will be indirectly encouraging them to learn how to subvert these controls just as in China or any other restrictive country.

I am offended that any government especially one as venal as ours gets to define what is 'offensive'.
Technology has now moved on, nowadays it is very easy to track a person's activities across the internet. Anything that expands their power to do so should be fought tooth and nail.

[Double Edge]

Google SOPA and you will come to know. They are giving content providers and government huge powers that can easily be misused.

They are thinking of doing it. Its still a bill. Just because it has the word 'act' does not mean its operative yet. Thats a US quirk.

What do you make of the parties opposed ?

Opponents of the bill include Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, the Brookings Institution and human rights organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch.

That is effectively censorship.

Agree, in principle. If they scare enough people then it becomes self-censorship. So the best way to counter them is start a campaign for everybody to post offensive stuff. A civil disobedience movement or gandhigiri. Then get sympathisers of the cause from around the world to join in the campaign.

It would be very easy for government to track and muzzle any person exposing their misdeeds once they have laws that allow them to collect such data

In theory. Think about a school network where many people share the same computer at different points in time, one person uplods something. How to catch the culprit ?

Scale that up countrywide and realise that 9 out 10 internet users in India do not have a home connection but use a shared one either at work or at school. Where is your tracking in this case.

So then they will have to block the offending site countrywide. They already do this but with more popular ones it will be harder. More sites come up for hosting, it becomes a hydra. What can they do then.

I am offended that any government especially one as venal as ours gets to define what is 'offensive'.

Well, this is the interesting bit, they've not or at least not upto now. So one has to assume that means basically anybody that takes offence can complain over anything. That can become unwieldy after a while.

Technology has now moved on, nowadays it is very easy to track a person's activities across the internet. Anything that expands their power to do so should be fought tooth and nail.

Agree and given the shitstorm its raised i'm wondering how far this will actually go. I think they want tracking, how successful they will be remains to be seen.

[Double Edge]

Not regulating web to protect PM, Sonia: Sibal | Devils Advocate | Dec 10 2011

New Delhi: Information Technology and Communication Minister Kapil Sibal, speaking to Karan Thapar on Devil's Advocate, clarified that the government did not want to pre-screen any of the content on various Internet platforms.

He said that the government had asked Internet platforms to form a set of guidelines according to their standards to protect the sentiments of people in the country.

Sibal said that he only asked them to remove content which was degrading, demeaning, vulgar and obscene, and unacceptable by any set of community standards.

some excerpts

Karan Thapar: Now there's a certain amount of confusion according to the reports in the press about what exactly you wanted. A senior official of your ministry quoted in 'The Hindu' on December 6, that you wanted screening pre-uploading. But the very next day on December 7, you said that actually you wanted them to look at content after it is uploaded and after it's been established that it was offensive. So what is it that you wanted, pre-uploading screening and monitoring or post uploading?

Kapil Sibal: Karan there can be no pre-screening of content on the electronic media and on the social media. Can we pre-screen the content we see on your channel, we cannot. It would be madness to ask for it and I don't think any sane person would. And we did not.

Karan Thapar: So I'm underlining two or three important things you've said. First of all, you were not looking for screening or monitoring before uploading. As you say that is impossible. That was not the government's position, any quotation in 'The Hindu' to that effect is wrong. Secondly, you were asking them to set up a system that they would set up, to monitor content after it was uploaded, if it was deemed to be offensive and that judgement would happen according to their standards not yours. Have I correctly understood you?

Kapil Sibal: Absolutely, and that if that content was unacceptable by our community standards, we'd point it out to them and they have the right to disagree.

Karan Thapar: They have the right to disagree?

Kapil Sibal: Ofcourse

Karan Thapar: Let's widen our discussion. Let me put to you one of the reasons why many people are suspicious perhaps even distrustful of the government and perhaps personally of your motives. It goes back to the fact that in April this year your ministry published what are called intermediary guidelines, which contained vague, wide and imprecise terms such as threatening, abusive, disparaging, harassing, blasphemous, objectionable, defamatory and people say that when a clever lawyer like Kapil Sibal deliberately uses such vague and imprecise terms he's obviously casting a wide net to try and entrap. He's creating room so that he's got the grounds to censor whenever he wants for whatever he wants.

Kapil Sibal: I'm surprised because if that were the case I would have censored all this stuff by now. I would have done it by now because the guidelines are there when we were having a dialogue with them. So obviously it was not my intent, ever, to interfere in the social media in any form whatsoever. I wanted them to evolve their own guidelines, by their own standards but if somebody throws up his hands to content which is unacceptable, I will have to do something…

Karan Thapar: Critics of yours turned around and say that rather than formally called the Internet platform, which is liable to be misunderstood and misinterpreted, as sadly has been the case, what you should have done, was take a leaf out of Digvijaya Singh's book, when he suffered similar problem personally and file an FIR and leave the matter to the police and court.

Kapil Sibal: You know Karan this is the procedure that will not work. By the time an FIR is filed and the investigation is done, we will have to get to know what the source of that content is and Google and Facebook refuse to provide that source to us. So who are we going to prosecute? Number two, assuming they give us the source many of them are outside our jurisdictions. So how do we prosecute? It will cost millions of dollars to prosecute. While we go to court outside our jurisdiction to prosecute, this content will be on website. It will have caused damaged and the kind of damage that you and I can't even imagine and even if I were to do that what would be the impact of that after 10 years. I want the solution today as it happened as the content is uploaded.

Karan Thapar: So a legal remedy for all the reasons you are giving me would be impractical?

Kapil Sibal: Impractical and it'll lead to nothing.

[AdityaMookerjee]

If a piece of writing or a cartoon may lead to violence and unrest, then will you allow the piece, even if it leads to violence, and to continuing, indefinite violence? What will the writer of the piece feel, when he perceives this unrest? He obviously didn't want this to happen, and thought that it wouldn't matter.

[Double Edge]

On how to rear a troop of well behaved monkeys :bang:

See the source for links to further reading

The War for India's Internet | Foreign Policy | Jun 6 2012

The War for India's Internet
Why is the world's biggest democracy cracking down on Facebook and Google?

BY REBECCA MACKINNON | JUNE 6, 2012

"65 years since your independence," a new battle for freedom is under way in India -- according to a YouTube video uploaded by an Indian member of Anonymous, the global "hacktivist" movement. With popular websites like Vimeo.com blocked across India by court order, the video calls for action: "Fight for your rights. Fight for India." Over the past several weeks, the group has launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against websites belonging to Internet service providers, government departments, India's Supreme Court, and two political parties.


Street protests are being planned for this coming Saturday, June 9, in as many as 18 cities to protest laws and other government actions that a growing number of Indian Internet users believe have violated their right to free expression and privacy online. A lively national Internet freedom movement has grown rapidly across India since the beginning of this year. The most colorful highlight so far was a seven-day Gandhian hunger strike, otherwise known as a "freedom fast," held in early May on a New Delhi sidewalk by political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and activist-journalist Alok Dixit. Trivedi's website was shut down this year in response to a police complaint by a Mumbai-based advocate who alleged that some of Trivedi's works "ridicule the Indian Parliament, the national emblem, and the national flag."

Escalating political and legal battles over Internet regulation in India are the latest front in a global struggle for online freedom -- not only in countries like China and Iran where the Internet is heavily censored and monitored by autocratic regimes, but also in democracies where the political motivations for control are much more complicated. Democratically elected governments all over the world are failing to find the right balance between demands from constituents to fight crime, control hate speech, keep children safe, and protect intellectual property, and their duty to ensure and respect all citizens' rights to free expression and privacy. Popular online movements -- many of them globally interconnected -- are arising in response to these failures.

Only about 10 percent of India's population uses the web, making it unlikely that Internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon. Yet activists are determined to punish New Delhi's "humorless babus," as one columnist recently called India's censorious politicians and bureaucrats, in the country's media. Grassroots organizers are bringing a new generation of white-collar protesters to the streets to defend the right to use a technology that remains alien to the majority of India's people.

The trouble started with the 2008 passage of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, whose Section 69 empowers the government to direct any Internet service to block, intercept, monitor, or decrypt any information through any computer resource. Company officials who fail to comply with government requests can face fines and up to seven years in jail. Then, in April 2011, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued new rules under which Internet companies are expected to remove within 36 hours any content that regulators designate as "grossly harmful," "harassing," or "ethnically objectionable" -- designations that are open to a wide variety of interpretations and that free speech advocates argue have opened the door to abuse. It is thanks to these rules that the website of the hunger-striking cartoonist, Trivedi, was taken offline. Also thanks to the 2011 rules, Facebook and Google are facing trial for having failed to remove objectionable content. If found guilty, the companies could face fines, and executives could be sentenced to jail time.

Saturday's protesters are calling for annulment of the 2011 rules and the repeal of part of the 2008 act. They are also calling for Internet service companies to reverse the wholesale blocking of hundreds of websites, including the file-sharing services isoHunt and The Pirate Bay, as well as the video-sharing site Vimeo and Pastebin, which is primarily used for the sharing of text and links. Internet service providers were responding to a court order from the Madras High Court demanding the blockage, which is aimed at preventing the online distribution of pirated versions of one particular film. The Internet companies, fearing that they would not be able to catch every individual instance on every possible site they host, instead chose to block entire services along with all of their content -- which had nothing to do with the film in question.

Such "John Doe" orders, named because they are directed against unknown potential offenders in the present and future, are characterized "by their overly broad and sweeping nature," argue lawyer Lawrence Liang and researcher Achal Prabhala, which extends "to a range of non-infringing activities as well, thus catching a whole range of legal acts in their net." More broadly, as Delhi-based journalist Shivam Vij wrote in a recent essay: "The current mechanisms of internet censorship in India -- blocking, direct removal requests to websites, intermediary rules -- are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny. They should not be amenable to misuse by the powers-that-be for their own private interests."

Not only are the rules abused, but researchers find that they are causing extralegal censorship by companies that overcompensate in order to err on the side of caution. Last year, the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society performed an experiment in which it sent "legally flawed" takedown demands to seven companies that provide a range of online services, including search, online shopping, and news with user-generated comments. The legal flaws in the notices were such that the companies could have rejected them without being in breach of the law. Yet "of the 7 intermediaries to which takedown notices were sent, 6 intermediaries over-complied with the notices, despite the apparent flaws in them," reads the Centre for Internet and Society report.

Despite the growing public opposition, a motion to annul the 2011 rules was defeated by voice vote in the upper house of Parliament last month. Yet the criticism was sufficiently sharp that Communications Minister Kapil Sibal announced that he will hold consultations with all members of Parliament, representatives of industry, and other "stakeholders" to discuss the law's problems and how it might be revised. Many of the law's critics, however, are skeptical that this will eliminate the law's deep flaws and loopholes for abuse, especially given the government's failure to listen so far. Comments on the 2011 rules submitted last year by the Centre for Internet and Society were not even acknowledged as having been received by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. "Sibal uses the excuse of national security and hate speech," says the center's director, Sunil Abraham, "but that is not what is happening."

Abraham worries that what is really happening is a government effort at Internet "behavior modification" through a process akin to an experiment involving caged monkeys, bananas, and ice water. Put four monkeys in a cage and hang a bunch of bananas on the ceiling. Every time one of them climbs up to reach the bananas, you drench all of them with ice water. Soon enough, the monkeys will start policing themselves -- attacking anybody who tries to reach the bananas, making it unnecessary for their masters to deploy the ice water. "This is why the government is being so aggressive so early on, with only 10 percent of India's population online," says Abraham. "If you start the drenching early on, by the time you get to 50 percent [Internet penetration], every one will be well-behaved monkeys." Companies will act as private Internet police for fear of legal punishment before the government is called upon to step in and enforce the law. If it works, Indian politicians could have fewer reasons to worry about online critiques or mockery, because companies fearing prosecution will proactively delete speech that could potentially be designated "harassing" or "grossly harmful."

India is not China or Iran, however. Its politicians may be corrupt, and most of its voters may not understand why Internet freedom matters because they've never used the Internet. But it still has an independent press and boisterous civil society that are not going to give up their critiques and protests anytime soon. India also has a strong, independent judiciary, with a record of ruling against censorship and surveillance measures when a strong case can be made that they conflict with constitutional protections of individual rights. "On free speech I have high faith in the Indian judiciary," says Abraham. "There is a good chance to launch a constitutional challenge."

If Google and Facebook lose at their impending trial -- now scheduled for July -- they will most certainly appeal, which activists hope could provide just such an opportunity to prevent the sort of "behavior modification" process that Abraham warns against. Now India's burgeoning Internet freedom movement needs its own reverse "behavior modification" strategy -- imposing consistent and regular doses of political and legal ice water upon India's bureaucrats, politicians, and companies whenever they do things that threaten to corrode the rights of India's Internet users. Saturday's protest is just the beginning.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a former CNN bureau chief in Tokyo and Beijing, co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, and author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.

[AdityaMookerjee]

Tell me, would you write a book, which is more people look at with some alarm, than like? I mean, if you do, then this thread doesn't matter. No one writes books for themselves, and please correct me, 'The Satanic Verses', did not make anyone rich, and to tell the truth, Mr Rushdie thought it would be appreciated. Otherwise he wouldn't have written it, and more importantly, it was published because he authored it. I don't want to create ill will, because I actually write for myself, and others happen to read it, if they do at all. I don't want to be a politician, or help people, because only the very foolish, or very ambitious feel people need 'helping', and because writers not as important as Mr Rushdie will have to be left without any state protection. I mean, if the writer is in the public attention, then only will the state want to give him protection. What if an unknown man had written 'Satanic Verses'? If he had been executed, no one, including his killer(s) would have cared, because he would have been killed first.

[Double Edge]

Tell me, would you write a book, which is more people look at with some alarm, than like? I mean, if you do, then this thread doesn't matter.

Ideally it should not matter whether people like it or not. As long as it isn't incitement.

..and because writers not as important as Mr Rushdie will have to be left without any state protection.

It isn't clear the state would even protect Rushdie, there are any number of laws that could be used to prosecute him. They did slightly better with the Bangla, Tasleema Nasreen, shuttling her around but she is almost under house arrest when she is in India.

What if an unknown man had written 'Satanic Verses'? If he had been executed, no one, including his killer(s) would have cared, because he would have been killed first.

If a murder has taken place, whether people care or not is moot.

[Double Edge]

So an editor decided to post one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in, get this, an Urdu publication of all places. Predictably it got people all hot and bothered. They never saw her side of the story. which is if these people have never seen Mohamed then how can these cartoons ever depict him.

The tyranny of hurt sentiment | IE | February 12, 2015

By: Dilip Simeon

Shirin Dalvi, the editor of the Mumbai edition of Urdu newspaper Avadhnama, has become the latest victim of the running saga over cartoons. Since mid-January, when she unwittingly published a Charlie Hebdo cover, she has been slapped with criminal charges, her newspaper shut down, its employees rendered jobless, and she herself forced underground. Vicious threats are sent to her via social media. All this is happening despite her printed apology. The police have opposed anticipatory bail on the ground that it would cause a law and order problem (aren’t they paid to deal with such matters?).

The man who filed the complaint heads an Urdu journalists’ body. He is cited as saying, “I filed a case against her and I am happy that she was arrested. If she was in an Islamic state, she would have been beheaded as per law.”

That the freedom of speech could be so flagrantly attacked in the name of religion is by now a common experience. Self-appointed guardians of faith have attacked our minds with relentless aggression for years. But that someone could wish a horrible death to another human being is itself highly offensive to many of us — and this person thinks it earns him merit in the eyes of Allah. I have no access to the mind of the Almighty, but I can venture to suggest that Allah is more considerate than some of his followers.

Hurt sentiment has become the cutting edge of tyranny. It is the perpetually available political tool for preparing “spontaneous” mob violence, violating the law, mobilising illiberal movements and intimidating everyone — especially within the preferred community — who disagrees with communal politics. It becomes worse when responsible individuals glamourise this fake and vicious form of piety.

Sentiment appeared in the law in the aftermath of the Rangila Rasul case of 1929, when the publisher Rajpal was murdered in Lahore by a 19-year-old youth named Ilm-ud-din. The boy pleaded guilty, against his lawyer M.A. Jinnah’s advice — this is reported as the only case Jinnah ever lost. The philosopher Allama Iqbal led the funeral ceremony, at which he reportedly declared: “This uneducated young man has surpassed us, the educated ones.” One of pre-Independence India’s outstanding thinkers had no qualms in glorifying murder in the name of hurt sentiment. Ilm-ud-Din is now revered as a ghazi in Pakistan. This is akin to the reverence accorded to V.D. Savarkar, a prime accused in the M.K. Gandhi murder case, not to mention the glorification of men like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and Nathuram Godse.

Section 295-A, which penalises offensive utterances, was framed in the aftermath of the Rangila Rasul case. Jinnah helped frame the act and stressed that it should apply only to cases of deliberate and malicious intent. The misuse of this law in India is well-documented. Pakistan augmented it with the death penalty for blasphemy. Pakistani Punjab’s governor Salman Taseer was murdered by his bodyguard for merely suggesting that the law be re-examined, in the context of the Aasia Bibi case. His killer has now acquired heroic status, and his appeal is led by a former chief justice of Punjab. Instead of advocating the non-violent resolution of conflicts, members of the elite have added fuel to the flames. A society whose philosophers, lawyers and judges think it fit to celebrate revenge killing is doomed to an infinite spiral of extremism.

The topic of blasphemy has always been suffused with blood-thirst. Let us be clear that Dalvi is not merely being harassed by a complainant, who is aided and abetted by a mean-spirited police and government. Formal harassment is only part of the story. More significant is the violence that underpins all the arguments, phone calls, arrests, social-media posts, etc. Dalvi is exposed to violence, with the active connivance of the state, which is supposed to protect her. By referring to beheadings and sharia law, the complainant is creating an ambience of murderous hate around this hapless woman. Can he not see that his behaviour mimics the hateful propaganda directed towards religious minorities and other vulnerable groups in India? In this case too, a minority is being oppressed. Shirin is a minority of one. Those who oppress minorities themselves have no business complaining about the oppression of minorities.

Islamic theology does not always lead in a tyrannical direction. The ideas of the Egyptian professor of religion Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the Sudanese thinker Mahmoud Mohammed Taha are worthy of respect. These learned scholars were persecuted for advocating liberal readings of the Quran and hadith. Abu Zayd was forced to divorce his wife and flee Egypt in the mid-1990s. Taha was executed in 1985 by a sharia court under the regime of the dictator Gaafar Nimiery. We would also profit from a study of the lives of famous Muslims from the national movement, such as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Azad; not to mention lesser known ones like Bibi Amtus Salam, whom Gandhi used to call his daughter.

A war of conscience is underway for the soul of Islam. The Dalvi case is merely the latest example. In July 2013, a lecture by the American Islamic scholar Amina Wadud was cancelled by the Centre for Islamic Studies in Chennai, because of threats received via a text message. The leader of a communal outfit had called the police and threatened an agitation. Instead of providing protection to the event, the police intimidated the organisers, who gave in. Why does the freedom of conscience and speech apply only to providing state protection to petty tyrants and blackmailers, and not to those who wish to criticise religion or to study alternative religious currents? What message do governments send to society by encouraging goondas and oppressing people of mild temper? What will happen to the rule of law if this continues?

Would the complainant in the Dalvi case kindly reflect on whether his religion contains some resources for restraint and compassion? Or is it, in his view, a compendium of justifications for working up murderous rage in the faithful? If the latter is the case, he is no different from those who hounded M.F. Husain out of India and who now wish to deify Godse. Whether he knows it or not, he is acting in their interest. His actions will not benefit Islam, rather, fanatics of other brands will be doubly energised. However, if he can find something gentle in his faith, let him use it as inspiration to withdraw the case.

Those of us who are more offended by gratuitous violence than by cartoons must defend Dalvi. We must demand that the government provide her with protection, investigate those threatening her (didn’t the police arrest a young woman for Facebook posts at the time of Bal Thackeray’s funeral?), and instruct the state prosecutors to drop the case. We have had it up to our throats with fabricated outrage. We, too, are angry at the police and government repeatedly surrendering their responsibility to protect peaceable citizens from hooligans wearing religious masks. Down with the tyranny of sentiment.

The writer is a labour historian based in New Delhi.

[lemontree]

This is just the beginning. The censor board chairman belongs to the RSS, and he has just banned some odd words that cannot be spoken on screen.
My grandma would have been so proud of him

I can just imagine we are on the verge of becoming a righteous and great Indian society. No one in the world can come close to us in culture and tradition :hug:

[Double Edge]

I can just imagine we are on the verge of becoming a righteous and great Indian society. No one in the world can come close to us in culture and tradition :hug:

Becoming weak. See this nonsense.

No Indian jokes please: a memo of dos and don’ts for Jerry Seinfeld | Scroll | Feb 17 2015

Jerry is about as inoffensive as you can get. More cerebral.

And I have not even started about the crap AIB had to put up with

Just so its clear, we are talking about BOMBAY here, you know that big metropilitan, cosmo whatever it is. Not some village in cowbelt UP.

[antimony]

So an editor decided to post one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in, get this, an Urdu publication of all places. Predictably it got people all hot and bothered. They never saw her side of the story. which is if these people have never seen Mohamed then how can these cartoons ever depict him.

I actually prefer morons filing cases. When the judges throw them out, this will set a precedent against morons

[Double Edge]

Was looking for an article that went into the background about the AIB debacle and this op-ed does a decent job. I watched the AIB Roast on youtube, once its out there it will not disappear and enjoyed it. That is, what was included on youtube, quite a few bits were actually removed by AIB before uploading. If you weren't there in person you will never know. Warra great idea to protect against copyright infringement

What was unique about it was it was pushing boundaries. Roast as they explain is an art form developed in 1949 where you slam the other guy and how you do it is what counts. Though people seem to have taken it literally and really speaks volumes about their comprehension of the language and its use.

The Great Indian Laughter Challenge: India is a funny country without a sense of humour | IE | Feb 15 2015

Written by Dipti Nagpaul | New Delhi | February 15, 2015 1:00 am

Weekday night at Mumbai’s popular comedy destination, Canvas Laugh Club. The lights dim, the red décor fades to black, a round of applause goes out and Jaideep Singh Juneja takes the stage. It’s a packed house.

His is a new act but neither his tone nor body language gives that away. Juneja grins, greets his audience and begins the 15-minute set. The 26-year-old talks about his experiences at dating, pokes fun at communities, the lines punctuated with profanities. But the best of his punchlines are reserved for his own tribe: “Sardars between the age of 15 and 40 all look the same, but the problem is we all look 40.” The audience already loves him.

When he starts with a dig at inter-caste marriage, though, someone in the audience has already taken offence. Juneja quickly pacifies him. “Hear me out, and if you don’t like the joke, you get a refund,” he says.

Going on, Juneja says many problems of his childhood are because his mother is a South Indian and his dad a Sikh. “Kundi in Punjabi refers to a latch while in Tamil it means the posterior. When I went to Chennai, I told the maid, ‘Madam, zara kundi kholna’,” he says. Up comes a collective guffaw from the audience and the detractor, too, is laughing.

A day later, Juneja feels “it could have been better”. He may have got the laughs, and who’d complain about that, but he says some of his best lines remained unused. There was a set on religion he had written but Juneja wasn’t sure if it would be acceptable to the audience.

Unless you were living under a rock the past few weeks, you’d probably understand the reasons for Juneja’s caution. In December last year, comic collective All India Bakchod (AIB) hosted a “roast”, a brand of insult comedy popular in the US. The format asks the participants — in this case Bollywood celebrities Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor and Karan Johar and the AIB comics — to hurl the choicest, filthiest insults at one another. They did, calling out Ranveer’s many peccadilloes, Arjun’s spectacular ordinariness and Johar’s positions on matters film-related and otherwise. It was a bitchfest Bollywood had never seen, or taken part in, in public. A 95-minute programme, AIB Knockout was a success, with over 4,000 attendees. Over a month later, an edited video of the event was uploaded by AIB on YouTube — and nearly broke the internet with 8 million views. But soon, as the AIB would later describe it, “the envelope pushed back”.

In three days, the backlash began in earnest against the “obscene” content. The Christian community, some members of the film industry and “concerned citizens of India” came out in protest. Threats were made, and FIRs lodged under sections of the Indian Penal Code that deal with obscenity in public and hurting religious sentiments. In five days, AIB took the video down; and within 12 days, the group had issued an apology to the Christian community offended by many jokes directed at Abish Mathew, a member of the AIB collective.

But if you are a stand-up comic doing business in India, would you really be surprised? The fear of “offending” the audience isn’t a new one. Juneja says, “Self-censorship begins at stage one, when we are writing our lines.”

What each artiste edits out is an individual choice, sometimes depending on the comic’s style and what he has to say. For instance, Delhi-based Sanjay Rajoura, with a sharp tongue for politics, doesn’t venture into adult comedy. Mumbai-based Anuvab Pal, with roots in theatre, prefers to tell character-driven stories with no scope for cuss words. “Whereas sometimes it’s just lihaaz,” says Varun Grover, who feels “not offending” is a part of Indian culture just as “not smoking in front of your elders is”.

Mumbai-based Karunesh Talwar points out that a comic makes it easier for his audience to confront taboo subjects, to cross the line when others don’t have the courage to. “A joke is the only way to bring that into public discourse, make it okay to talk about it,” he says.

Yet, stand-up comics are always filtering content to protect themselves. And dodging the bogeyman of “Indian culture,” that catchall excuse used to vandalise night clubs, bar young couples from hanging together, deny women their rights, censor films and, most recently, gag the AIB show.

Mumbai-based Sorabh Pant, who started the collective East India Comedy (EIC), is among the oldest names in the business. Before turning a full-time stand-up comic six years ago, Pant wrote for Channel V. His first taste of audience disapproval came in form of “banal” complaints. “Someone from Raipur wrote in to say that a show’s young protagonist had the poster of a bikini-clad woman in his room and that had offended him,” says Pant. He confesses that he consciously keeps the content at EIC “clean”. “I’m in this business because I love making jokes. I won’t do anything to jeopardise it,” he says. Pant makes minimal use of cuss words and sex comedy — the popular adult stand-up show by EIC, Men are from Mars, being an exception.

Bangalore-based Kanan Gill, too, admits his own brand of humour is too dark for the Indian audience. What he presents in his stand-up shows is a toned down version. “I read a driving-over-babies or a Sati joke sometimes and am laughing for the next hour. But I cannot present any of those subjects on stage for fear of a backlash,” he says. He would not even tell us what constitutes a Sati joke, lest it offend anyone reading this piece.

Sometimes, the audience at an open-mic event will heckle the comic if they find a joke offensive, as Juneja found out. “But such instances are rare in ticketed events as the audience is usually aware of what it is in for, which is why none of the 4,000 attendees of AIB Knockout complained about the content,” says Salvador D’Souza of Canvas Laugh Club.

In many private shows, even if held in a secure environment with a discerning audience, people are stopped from recording the gags. That’s when comics let it all flow. But they also know they have to watch their back. Most of the outrage surfaces online. Any comic will tell you that the content on the Web is not half as bold as what they present in a live show. Sahil Shah of EIC cites the example of their video Wrecking God. Set against the backdrop of Mumbai’s Ganapati festival, it tried to convey that no religion need impose its traditions on citizens. The last few lines in the video were: “We do respect your religion/ Hindu Sikh Muslim or Christian/ Don’t force-feed us your tradition/ It’s not biryani. Disclaimer: This is just a parody, we still love our country.”

But there are occasions when the comedians may miscalculate the risk involved. For an episode of Jai Hind!, a web-based comedy show now off air, Grover had penned a fake interview of the centenarian marathon runner Fauja Singh. When asked what kept him running at the age, the actor playing Singh said he’s been used to running, first during the Partition, then in 1984 during the riots. The video went viral after the Sikh community protested. The makers of Jai Hind! received death threats and cases were filed against them in Punjab, Canada and the UK. The group eventually had to seek police protection. Grover has been watchful since.

It’s perhaps the same fear that had AIB edit out close to half the video of AIB Knockout — portions that may have been considered too crass or would have not gone down well with some members of the film industry. There were jokes on Arjun Kapoor and his alleged ex-girlfriend, and Salman Khan’s sister Arpita Khan. Many ones on Prime Minister Narendra Modi were left out.

Pant says that the AIB brouhaha perhaps went out of hand because of the presence of celebrities. “That bridged the gap between such a niche form of entertainment and the Indian masses. People who have for so long watched the Great Indian Laughter Challenge or Comedy Nights with Kapil were suddenly exposed to AIB’s brand of humour,” he says. Many of them did not find it funny.

The controversy has already acted as a gag order. AIB has refused to speak to the media. EIC, for instance, has been getting a slew of abuses for their videos — some over a year old. Aditi Mittal, the only woman participant of the Knockout, has been viciously abused on Twitter. She had to cancel several of her shows.

The self-censorship is now a notch higher, making some think twice before they even tweet. Gurgaon-based American comedienne of Indian origin, Radhika Vaz, wanted to refer to the AIB apology as an “abortion” on social media in a tongue-in-cheek reaction.“I had not fully framed the tweet, but it was to the effect that ‘The AIB apology sounds like an abortion. What irony, given the religion it is meant for opposes the practice’. But I didn’t, I wasn’t sure how it would be received.”

Both Gill and Talwar, while admitting that there are subjects they stay away from, refused to spell out exactly what they are censoring, for fear of more nuisance. Organisers, on their part, are hoping that restaurants and bars that served as venues for stand-up acts and helped expand the scene, don’t back out.

The silver lining, when one looks for it, is in the enormous curiousity the AIB Knockout has elicited in small towns and non-metro cities. The comics have had many inquiries from Nashik, Nagpur, Udaipur, Ludhiana and so on.

The comedy scene, which began from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, over the last year or two, has witnessed a slow but steady expansion to smaller cities. Pant says that he regularly takes his shows to cities such as Guwahati, Jaipur, Shillong, Kochi and other cities.

Does the content need to vary from what they put out in the metro cities? The view on that is divided. While some such as Pal and Rajouri say they don’t need to temper down their original script as their shows usually revolve around universal subjects, Grover and Pant say they do tame down the gags depending on the audience. “A cuss word in a city like Mumbai will add to a joke but in a place like Gwalior, where moral values are still a big deal, it can prove a hindrance. People there may not laugh at the punchline even if it is good, for the fear of being judged,” he says.

Akshata Agarwal, co-founder of The Awkward Fruit, which organises live stand-up shows in cities across Maharashtra, explains that most comics keep two sets ready, one of which is “clean”. Judging by the response, they switch if they think the audience is not comfortable.

In addition, organisers and sometimes comic collectives, also run checks on the venues ahead of a show so that the content can be designed to suit the audience. “Corporates often want their shows clean,” say Vinay Khandelwal, founder of Vinsolution Outsourcing that organises events in Jaipur. He adds that he invites stand-up comics based on the client or venue. “One of the clubs is frequented by people in the older age bracket. A Hindi comic talking politics would work better there. But most of our clients approach us after having watched one of our shows in Mumbai or Delhi, so they are aware of what to expect,” he says.

India is a funny country without a sense of humour, says Arunabh Kumar of The Viral Fever, best known for Barely Speaking with Arnub, an online parody programme. “It’s a young nation where few people are literate, even fewer are privileged. In those terms we do just fine. And increasingly, we are getting less and less offended. But our culture is also hard-wired into us, that it will take some time before we stop getting offended,” he says.

Most comedians are hopeful that once the dust has settled, the laughs will return. Talwar likens the situation to a young boy’s parents discovering his smoking habit. “When they find out, you don’t stop smoking; instead, they get used to it after a while.”

[Double Edge]

I actually prefer morons filing cases. When the judges throw them out, this will set a precedent against morons

See the charges filed against the AIB crew along with their guests. Apparently telling people likely to be offended not to watch at the start wasn't enough. Going by the charges, the complainant wasn't even at the show but got 'offended' by watching it on youtube (!)

According to the complaint that Daundkar’s lawyer Abha Singh submitted to the court, the Bollywood celebrities present at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium where the show was held had cracked “pre-scripted, vulgar, pornographic and obscene jokes”. Singh said these words were spoken in front of a large number of women in open defiance of Indian laws.

The court ordered the FIR to be filed under
- Section 156 (3) of the Criminal Procedure Code, under which a magistrate can order the police to investigate a case about which he receives a complaint.
The sections under which the police will initiate investigation include
- Section 120-b (criminal conspiracy),
- Sections 294, 509 (obscene acts or words in a public place, act intended to outrage a woman’s modesty)
- IPC and Section 67 and 66 A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (circulation of obscene content on the Internet).

Singh also cited provisions of the Bombay Police Act 1951,
- Section 15 of the Environment Protection Act, 1986 (illegal change of use of Coastal Regulation Zone area) and the Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act, 1966.

The 14 persons named in the complaint include president of the National Sports Club of India (NSCI) Jayantilal Shah, NSCI secretary general Ravinder Aggarwal, organisers of the show, film critic Rajeev Masand, stand-up comedians Rohan Joshi, Tanmay Bhatt, Gursimran Khamba, Ashish Shakya and Aditi Mittal, among others. The NSCI manages the stadium where the programme was held.

The complainant in the case, Daundkar, has been involved in several high-profile litigations in the past, including the Adarsh Society case, the case on the purchase of bullet-proof jackets for Mumbai Police after the 26/11 terror attacks and the Hiranandani Powai case on urban land ceiling violations. He has also approached the Brihanmumbai Municipal Complaints with complaints that made headlines, including one on alleged violations in the construction of Mannat, Shah Rukh Khan’s bungalow in Bandra.

Quite clearly intimidation by some litigator with a reputation looking to make more waves.

But the people charged are moneyed and can afford legal protection. Whether they will fight these cases or settle out of court usually by issuing some 'sincere & heartfelt' apology remains to be seen.

Should they fight i wonder if they could set a precedent or whether they would just get off on technicalities.