Morality play comes to town

However, a critical look at the substantive penal provisions in the context of society today is in order. Section 67 of the IT Act, using 19th century victorian English for 21st century cyberspace, declares that anyone who publishes or transmits in electronic form any material which is “lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest” or has an effect such as to “tend to deprave and corrupt” shall be punished with five years imprisonment for the first offence and ten years for subsequent ones. Section 80 gives power to the police to enter any public place, search and arrest without warrant any person suspected of committing or about to commit an offence under the Act. The explanation to the section makes it clear that shops, hotels, cybercafes fall within the ambit of “public space”. The bizarre actions of the Aligarh policemen after the MMS case — roughing up young people and pulling the hair of girls in cyber cafes to make them face news channel cameras — have demonstrated the hazards of conferring such a power.

Categories like ‘‘lascivious’’, ‘‘prurient’’ and ‘‘deprave and corrupt the young’’ are taken straight from the Indian Penal Code enacted in 1860 and reflect the conservative morality of that time. These are based on victorian beliefs that “premature” interest in sex would impair the health and maturation of the young and lead to insanity or stunted growth. Rather than recognising the sexuality of the young and attempting to provide for it in a caring and responsible fashion, the law reflects total denial.

Expressions used in the law are so vague and broad that a wide variety of works from Saadat Hassan Manto to Arundhati Roy can fall within the ambit. The victorian morality meshes with the conservatism of our own society. Till today, there is strong opposition to sex education in schools. Even the few schools which have sex education introduce it in inhibited fashion at a stage by which time the children already know all about the birds and the bees. It is secrecy and shadiness which imbue undesirable feelings of shame and guilt around sex.

Given the materials on the Net and the CDs available from Palika Bazaar to Bombay VT, the absurdity in prosecuting the MMS or Anara case is striking. Given the daily news of child abuse, rape and molestation, stigmatising young people engaging in consensual sex in the name of striking a blow for morality strains the credulity.

In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the “Communication Decency Act”. The US Supreme Court in Reno versus American Civil Liberties Union in 1997 struck down the legislation and held that the Internet was a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide communications with content as diverse as human thought and was entitled to the highest protection. The court declared that “interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship”. It further observed that protection of minors could be just as effectively achieved by parents choosing filtering or blocking software and therefore government interference was not constitutionally justified.

In the context of pornography and the depiction of sexual acts, sociologist Gayle Rubin in Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality writes that “there is no evidence that readers of erotica commit a disproportionate number of sex crimes compared to any other random social group”. Rubin argues that scapegoating pornography in fact blocks out an understanding of structures which create sexism, aggression and violence in society which would help in grappling with the roots of sex crimes.

The writer is an advocate, Supreme Court