In the small-town India I grew up in, students sick of being told how Napoleon had said that the word impossible did not figure in his dictionary, coined a word to describe tasks ridiculous even to attempt. One would like to dust that lovely adjective “unimpossible” and use it for the misguided efforts of the government to ban pornography on the internet, which is virtual, has no national boundaries and is anonymous to boot.
Unimpossible, the affidavit filed by the hapless secretary, Department of Telecom (DoT), also seemed to agree. There is a prescribed procedure to block objectionable adult sites, but there are complicated technical issues and practical difficulties that stand in the way of an effective ban on 800-odd sites.
[related-post]
Most porn viewed in India is on websites located in other countries that treat all kinds of adult porn, barring child pornography, as legal. Even if the government were to single out child porn for banning, it may be unimpossible to apply our laws as the servers are located in foreign states. And even if that were done, there is a risk that such an exercise may also inadvertently filter out material related to vital medical and academic research.
Also, technology has made it unimpossible to block any server completely. The entities will soon locate another server in another country to transmit the objectionable material. Besides, in India, users are also located in villages where smartphones (and, ironically, many government-provided laptops) are used to view porn.
The government would be well served if it were to seriously debate the definition of pornography and, for once, include the women’s point of view. In India, ideas of male and female access to the internet and laws that define porn are mostly controlled, legislated and implemented by men. Women’s lived experiences about what actually constitutes an objectionable and indecent portrayal is not even allowed a guest appearance whenever obsolete laws are amended.
Under the aegis of a male supremacist epistemology, our family and kinship rules, sexual mores and family laws continue to determine that, with few exceptions, men be deemed the natural and legal guardians of women and children and of sexual access to them. In 2014, when the state took up Section 292 of the IPC to redefine “morality and decency”, it set no clear judicial standards but adopted “community standards” as the benchmark. Two things followed: One, liberal legalism was taken as unquestioningly legitimised. This turned many cases of unfair dominance and trafficking of women and children by men from their families invisible. Two, since women could not speak up, the dominant male view of pornography was accepted as the community’s. This “community standard” is invoked whenever a ban on porn is sought.
No wonder the situation has become nightmarish for jurists. Some high courts ruled that private porn-viewing was okay and it was only commercial sale thereof that was illegal (‘The problem with obscenity’ by Apar Gupta, The Indian Express, August 5). And the apex court was forced to ask the government to make the litigation “non-adversarial” and devise a speedy solution. The Centre sought a list of objectionable porn sites that was, inadvertently or otherwise, made public.
No law today gives the porn industry the right to show women and children being forced into sexual bondage. But this has not been necessary, since no law has so far questioned men’s sexual access to women and children. No government site shows porn but it does not need to because, regardless of obscenity laws, no consumer of porn will encounter serious trouble in getting it. Ironically, women on their own can neither challenge rape within marriage nor assert the right to abort an unwanted foetus legally. It is also wrong to say that access to porn sites is limited to major towns and the middle classes. Visual porn no longer mandates the viewer to be literate and/or know English. So it is time the government abandoned the well intentioned but “unimpossible” task of speedily banning a porn sites and brought the legal focus back on our flawed family laws.
The writer is former chairperson, Prasar Bharati
