Attack on Free Speech

For the past few days the Indian government has blocked acess to Blogspot, Typepad and Geocities among other sites. The government's case apparently is that these sites are being used to spread hate speech and to co-ordinate terrorist attacks. It is quite obviously a sham: terrorists and hate-mongerers have the entire Internet available to them, blocking a few blog-hosting sites can hardly be a deterrent. The actual result of the government's action has been to put hundreds of thousands of inocuous blogs, many of them written by Indians themselves, out of the reach of Indian citizens.

At my most charitable I think that the government is trying to make it appear that it is doing something in response to the horrible terrorist attack in Mumbai. Recently, there were newspaper reports of people living in Mumbai's slums on the flimsy pretext that "a lot of illegal activity goes on in these places."

But beyond that, I think that the Indian government---just like governments elsewhere---is using the popular outrage against terrorism in order the curtail democratic freedom. The present incident sets a dangerous precedent of the government's restricting free speech on the Internet without any just cause or due process.


India has a vibrant blogger community and they have organised splendidly to oppose this arbitrary and authoritarian move of the government. A wiki Bloggers Against Censorship and a Google Group Bloggers Collective have been set up to coordinate the efforts. It turns out that at least so far it is quite simple to circumvent the restrictions, for example by using proxy services. But more important than technical measures, it is necessary to build up public opinion so that the protections guaranteed to lawful speech by the Indian Constitution are enforced on the Internet as well.