Usually, in an argument, especially an interesting one, both sides have compelling viewpoints in great disagreement with each other.
In a high quality debate, both parties learn a bit more about each other, and walk away better informed, better educated, and perhaps better prepared for the next round, which will hopefully lead to some sort of resolution.
On the 7th of December, listening to Kapil Sibal in the press conference, after having followed his none too brilliant reasoning on a few other issues, I finally understood how an argument can completely lose its purpose, when one of the parties is not just ill informed, but also is incapable of being better informed.
Kapil Sibal wants to police the internet. Make no mistake about it. He wants censorship of a medium that has brought tremendous benefits at a very low cost to nation and consumer. But he doesn't understand it.
Apparently, there is some "material" out there somewhere in cyberspace that is incendiary, communal, and potentially dangerous. According to this article in The Hindu - http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/article2693232.ece, -- Earlier this year, the government circulated rules which made it incumbent on internet intermediaries — like Facebook and Yahoo — to exercise due diligence to block material deemed, “threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, objectionable, defamatory, … or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever.” --
What can be unlawful about an opinion in any bloody society? The internet is a free speech zone, plain and simple. Whoever writes whatever they write in cyberspace is not a broadcast, and it would be absurd to expect the same rules to apply to the internet content, as we could to print, television, and radio. We're already warped in imagining all media are the same!
Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdulla has said he has had mobs throwing stones at him, when some idiot posted something nasty about his personal life on the internet. So, he supports Kapil Sibal's grandiose ideas about curbing certain type of content on websites. The truth is, the problem is not with the internet, it is with the mobs! They need to grow up and join the vast majority of internet users who can easily distinguish between mischief and information. They can easily distinguish between blasphemy and mockery, sarcasm and wit.
If I remember right, Indira Gandhi was murdered because it came on government controlled radio and television that the Golden Temple of Amritsar had been destroyed by an operation authorized by her. If I remember right, it was also news of her assassination that was maliciously and meticulously spread by Doordarshan and AIR that caused riots, murder, rape, and looting in many parts of India. Why was the government not intelligent enough to stop that information spread? Bad judgment? Then that is a case of incompetence!
If I remember right, it came on television that the Babri Masjid had been destroyed. Why was there no media blackout of that incident that led to untold misery for the nation in the form of terrorist attacks? When traditional media has in its own rigorous way, caused the suffering of untold millions, why try to censor the internet, which has a much better track record? So far, not even one major incident of national shame has been sparked off by anything on the internet.
Repeatedly in the press conference, Sibal asked, "Have you seen the material? Have you seen the material?", and nobody in the press had seen it. So, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology is making a fuss about something that only he has seen and considers inappropriate? Sorry Sir, it is YOU who needs to grow up. How about making the URL public, and we'll decide for ourselves if we need to flag it down? If the majority of the users of that intermediary flag it down, guess what? The "material" is taken out! You don't have to spend national resources doing this, idiot.
The internet is self-regulatory. And of course we know no untoward incident can possibly take place by a photoshopped image of Sonia Gandhi controlling her pet monkey Manmohan Singh. Heck I even agree with the message! Even if I didn't, I could always counter it with Advani as a destructive chimpanzee. Nobody would take that seriously either.
What Kapil Sibal is missing here is that the internet is a community without authority, but plenty of democracy, and that is precisely why it is trusting of itself and other members in it. It is fully capable of allowing and regulating its own freedom, because there are clearly defined spaces within it, where the playing field is level for all players, and the extremists are treated like dirt in any forum. This is the greatest experiment in human collaboration and so far it has been fantastically successful. Example: Wikipedia, which is a free, editable encyclopedia, has the fewest errors of all encyclopedias in the world.
Devoid of any sort of overbearing authority, the internet is fully capable of flourishing and nourishing humanity. Governments and leaders are not. Here is why governments and leaders are afraid of the internet - it offers a level playing field! If a minister tweets a stupid message and gets an intelligent retort, he is exposed immediately! It does not TAKE a newspaper to spread that retort universally. All it takes is a cheap cellphone and a brainwave. This is what is threatening Kapil Sibal. And it should.
Here is why - For getting a simple subsidy on a solar power installation, from a scheme announced by the government, it takes two and a half years, if you are not willing to bribe anyone in the ministry of renewable energy and resources. Kapil Sibal sent notices to some intermediaries like Yahoo, Facebook and Google asking them to remove objectionable content and has not heard from them - since October! Only three months to evolve a whole new paradigm for a phenomenon that encompasses all of humanity, but two and a half years to honour a subsidy scheme started by the government by itself? Sounds like double standards to me!
If an intermediary should be responsible for providing the platform to a supposedly objectionable activity, (only Kapil Sibal thinks it is objectionable!), then think about this - why is the Indian Railways providing the platform for sales of illegal DVDs? The law clearly prohibits piracy of movies, but on any train running in waking hours, bootleggers are welcomed and allowed to flourish on Indian trains. So, Indian Railways should be shut down? How come ISPs are not held responsible for illegal downloads of movies?
Citizens have realities, governments have excuses. In a people vs. the government argument, for me, somehow, it is already very very hard to sympathize with inefficiency, corruption, and sheer megalomania. Add incompetence to this mix, and it is a potent reaction from me, to what Kapil Sibal is suggesting.
For its part, the internet intermediaries do take down material which violates guidelines of decency. These guidelines are far more fiercely enforced in the collective, by the collective, than any government could ever dream of. If you flag something as abuse, and there are enough flags, that material goes OUT! It happens faster than an Indian Government minister can even possibly fathom.
Almost all developments that have come about because of the internet, like online banking, shopping, and communications have helped India enormously. The end user is in ecstasy compared to the inefficiencies of standing in line, filling out paper applications and the endless list of aimless time wastage. There is no public outcry about how corrupt the internet is, even though pornography and other evils are rampantly on display. The reason is simple - the internet is also incredibly personal. It is as personal as my prayer to God. If I pray that Sonia Gandhi die of some disease, that doesn't mean prayer should be made illegal!
Kapil Sibal wants these intermediaries to provide the government information on who posts what material, information on the physical identity of those expressions, so that he can prosecute. But he doesn't want to restrict social media, he says! I guess there won't be any restrictions when society has been prosecuted and imprisoned.
It should surprise none that Babudom would be under threat. It shows our Babus that they are irrelevant. No wonder you will never get any e mail reply from most government officials with "official" e mail addresses on badly designed government websites. If fact, you will get delivery error reports within seconds.
On a scale of real and pressing problems, objectionable material on the internet cannot rank in the top 95% compared to killer hospitals, corrupt governments, infanticide, illegal mining, black money, graft, rape, farmer suicides, murder, terrorism, and nepotism. Material on the internet has no bloody chance of trying to compete against any of this.
So why this attention from Kapil Sibal? The answer lies in ACCESS. So far, despite all the problems and incompetence, the citizen had no equal platform to challenge viewpoints and ideas in the open. You had to have power and money and influence to throw your voice out there. Today you can compose a song and reach millions as the "Kolaveri" kids have shown us.
It is this same ACCESS that prevents internet content from causing riots on the streets. If you show a picture of my God having sex with a crocodile, I can bloody well post a picture of your God being raped by my dog! Who takes this kind of crap seriously when you can hit back in EQUAL measure? That is what this access provides us! That is what other media do not provide us with! If MF Hussain showed his work ONLY on the internet, there would be no repercussions on the street, because if he paints my goddess nude, I can.... you get the point. There is no need to seek out the person in the real world, because we can hit back right there!
Even the case of the Danish cartoonist who is suffering the fatwa against him for the depiction of Mohammed the Prophet in poor taste, took on those dimensions only because a newspaper was involved. It is hard for the common world citizen to stand equal to a newspaper in ANY geography. But if it had been a purely online contest, chances are his stupid depiction would have been flagged down by users as blasphemous and that would have been the end of that.
Truth is, the internet has spawned a global mindset where we fundamentally see and respect one another as humans. We know certain things are sensitive to certain people and netiquette is far ahead of cultural etiquette in many ways. Even typing in capitals is considered rude in cyberspace, but these parliamentarians have no problem admitting murderers, rapists, and criminals of varied hues into hallowed spaces of national governance, who beat each other up while on duty representing us! Where is the damn comparison?
With the proliferation of cameras and cellphones and the internet, images of rank incompetence quickly reach a vast majority of us who would react and make noise. Traditional media could pick and choose what was appropriate for our consumption. The internet doesn't care! Everything for everybody! And it has worked beautifully so far.
If something works beautifully, the only thing that can stop it from flourishing is authority. That is what Kapil Sibal is trying to provide us. It is time to kick his honourable rump out of office along with the bunch of cronies that don't understand the first thing about community. They don't understand the first thing about many other things, either.
But this is what I am most irked by - If our great Indian civilization is capable of taking so much pride in itself, then why do we fear our own freedom so much? Do we need political punks to even tell us how to behave with one another? I really do not need Kapil Sibal, the fool who thinks the country lost no money on the 2G scam to tell me how to express myself on the internet. Decency be damned! Clear your desk and get the *#&@% out of the way, fool. You are just rank incompetent for this debate.
- BSK.
