What a sick gag

First VSNL, in a paroxysm of nationalism, unilaterally blocked access to the Website of Dawn, Pakistan's most credible newspaper. Then Da...

First VSNL, in a paroxysm of nationalism, unilaterally blocked access to the Website of Dawn, Pakistan8217;s most credible newspaper. Then Dawn readers in India raised a stink about covert censorship on the Internet. Quite unsuccessfully, one might add. We seem to be a people doomed to repeating history.

Other nations have been through this process before. And canny individuals have created services to get around censorship. Today, for an ISP like VSNL to try to block a site is an exercise in futility. The user merely has to go to the Website of one of the services aforementioned, then carry on to the blocked site. The ISP will have no clue that he has moved on into forbidden territory. To name these services would be to invite further blockades from VSNL, but Indian users are Net-literate enough to find out for themselves.That said, there is indeed reason to raise a stink about the blockade but the proper venue for that would be Parliament or the courts, not the Internet community. What the case points to isthe utter lawlessness of Indian cyberspace. It is a medieval place where anyone with access to the levers of power has the right to infringe upon the rights of others, curtailing freedom of information in the very space where the information age was born.

But another case of arrant medievalism in West Bengal merits more attention. Shamit Khemka, an Internet entrepreneur in Calcutta, has been jailed for insulting Bengalis on a Website he owns. True, the site had an obscene name, was gratuitously offensive to Bengali personalities and sensibilities and declared itself to owned by the Culture De-partment of the state government. But only the last fault of misrepresentation is a cognisable offence. The content of the site itself was too puerile to be taken seriously. To see what a hate campaign is all about, the West Bengal government should take a look at some White supremacist Websites. Sure, they exist. They8217;re perfectly legal, so long as they don8217;t actually cause violence.

Khemka was charged withfomenting ill-will between Bengalis and Marwaris he belongs to the latter community. It is difficult to see how the state can make the charge stick. It will have to prove that he prevailed upon the Marwaris of Calcutta including the Khaitans and the Goenkas to the extent that they were ready to physically attack Be-ngalis. An absurd thesis, but given the fine efficiency of our legal system, it might stick.

Which brings us to certain unwelcome implications. Graffiti artists should begin to feel pretty vulnerable. So should the ladies and gentlemen of the press. So should Hyde Park Corner types, of whom there is no dearth in Calcutta. Come to think of it, there is a certain gentleman who has made it his life8217;s mission to cover the walls of the city with incontrovertible evidence for an earth-centred universe. For more than a decade, he has freely attacked Galileo, Kepler, NASA and the Jet Propulsion La-boratory. Obviously, this man must be savagely put down. He is bonking our fragile little minds, is henot, just like PTV and Dawn?

Even paedophiliacs, the most reprehensible people in cyberspace, are treated with more circumspection in the rest of the world than we accord to our digital graffiti artists. Even a known child molester cannot be arrested unless there is evidence that he actually tried to lure a specific child over the Internet. In the US, FBI agents have to pose as children online to secure convictions.

A Bill concerning Internet law is to be moved in the next session of Parliament. Everyone who lives in the information age should pay heed to the debate and influence it if they can. They should see that it builds on established western Internet law, or we will be doomed to repeat history yet again.