The Threat Of Internet Censorship In India
By Prabhat Sharan
12 April, 2011
The Verdict Weekly
LIBERATION? AMAZING, the extent to which criminal instincts persist in human nature. I use the word ‘criminal,’ deliberately. Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as….well as the motion of the aero and its speed. When its speed equals zero, it does not move; when a man’s freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.” (‘We’-Yevgeny Zamyatin)
“You don’t need to watch everyone if everyone believes they’re being watched, Nash explained, “Punishment isn’t necessary, but the inevitability of punishment has to be programmed into the brain…Privacy has become a convenient fiction…A few libertarians objected to this intrusion, so the government transferred control of the program to the Terrorism Information Awareness system. Once the word “: Total,” was replaced by the word “Terrorism,” all the criticism stopped…I will be watched too. Everyone will be watched. It’s a very democratic system. That’s the cleverness of the Panopticon. It’s designed so as that you can never see the face of your guard or hear him moving about…the prisoner must assume that he is being watched all the time. After a while, that realization becomes part of the prisoner’s consciousness... besides they rarely recognize the prison. There’s always some distraction. A war in the Middle East. A scandal involving celebrities. The World Cup or the Super Bowl. Drugs…Advertisements. A novelty song. A change of fashion… Fear will get people into our Virtual Panopticon and then we’ll keep them happy. People will be free to take antidepressant drugs, go into debt and stare at their television sets. Society might seem disorganized, but it will be very stable. Every few years we’ll pick up a different mannequin to give speeches from the White House Rose Garden. (John Twelve Hawks - The Traveller)
From Zamyatin’s famous dystopian novel ‘We’ to George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ to Philip K Dick’s short novels, to William Golding’s , ‘ Lord of the Flies,’ to John Twelve Hawks ‘The Traveller,’ the disturbing theme of thought control and quashing of freedom of thinking has come out from the realm of fiction.
The fiction is now a socio-political reality, out staring every human being. Like Toynbee’s “Dominant Minority,” the power elite wants to snuff out and quell every thought it feels threatened with.
The corporate-run Indian State, a face for the power elite running the country as a real estate and hypermarket, is all set to implement the banning of thought, expression and critical consciousness by proposing to carry out amendments in the Information Technology Act (2000.)
Of course, on the surface level it does seems that it is more of a knee-jerk reaction to the sudden emergence of internet activism and more specifically to Wikileaks which to some extent ripped off the masks from the ruling class propaganda and also rustled up people’s consciousness at a subliminal level.
The proposed amendments have already come under criticism in scores of incisive articles on internet, but ironically, the corporate establishment media- except for a handful of them- has not come out openly against the proposed ‘internet censorship, ‘ hidden in legalese veils.
The proposed censorship which intends to strait-jacket the editors of websites and bloggers or “intermediaries,” as it terms them is nothing but an attempt to weave an atmosphere of fear where everyone has to keep a watch over everybody.
The State is all out to create a society where everybody should distrust everybody. A society, where paranoia will be all-pervasive; and a Hobbesian political space where ideas can and will be monitored, and tuned, as per the diktats of the corporate-run State.
Already, the government is steaming ahead in full force implementing the much reviled and discarded world over, UID Aadhar- an intangible instrument to monitor the movements of people and manipulate them as per the wishes of corporate interests.
Now, a new set of nails are being hammered into the coffins prepared by the State--the proposal to circumscribe thoughts and ideas floating in cyberspace. Since both print as well as television media already in control of the new dictators of the world-the corporate bodies; internet as a medium for expression of ideas had come as a boon to people refusing to get deafened by the cacophony of corporate ideology.
In its earlier days, print media had been a tool for raising uncomfortable questions and in provoking people to think and sometimes even exhorting them to act. The ruling class soon realized the power of the medium and clamped down on it by controlling the processes of the ideas through which they flowed.
The visual medium also fared the same fate. Now it is the turn of the internet. However, unlike the print or the television medium requiring a substantial amount of physical machinery for its processing and thus a necessity of a certain amount of initial capital, the internet on the other hand was more intangible, requiring minimal amount of capital.
Though yet to realize its optimum latent potentiality, the impact of the ideas floating through this medium has certainly not been less forceful than the other conventional forms of medium, despite its manipulation and control and monitoring being relatively more easy, simple and total.
It is precisely because of this probable anarchic nature of medium that world over specially countries influenced by Thatcherism and wallowing in control of corporate ideology, a clampdown on internet activism has become a top priority. The tightening of noose on the internet is being carried out exactly in the manner working class unions were once strangulated. India is certainly not the country which would like to be left behind in this race.
Thus, such a proposal. The maxim of which in simple words is: You should read and see what we want you to read and see; and think, what we want you to think. And there is no better way to achieve this sinister aim, than by controlling the very medium where every electrical pulsation of thoughts coursing through neurons, gets filtered though synapses monitored and manipulated by the gatekeepers put up by the State.
India has a long history of draconian laws like MISA, TADA, POTA, etc. The proposed IT Act amendment is no different. Like the so-called TADA, POTA and other similar acts which were usually used to quell the rebels and shackle those who dared to raise their voices against authorities, the proposed IT Act amendment is to ensure that the sporadic questioning voices be muffled effectively.
The “intermediaries,” can be hauled up if the State finds the ideas or the analysis projected on their web site or blog ‘objectionable. The web site editors will not only have to report and keep a diary specifying ‘the details about their contributors, but even the onus of publishing a so-called ‘objectionable,’ material will be on them. The same will be the case with the bloggers who will have to keep a track on their respondents.
In other words, only calcified approved ideas henceforth will be allowed in cyberspace. The print and visual medium like the State machineries, had long, long time ago fallen into the manipulating hands of the corporate world.
In other words what the State wants is that the internet medium should also go the way corporate establishment media functions and carry out ‘propaganda,’ by twisting ideas, images and words. In a perceptive study of contemporary mass media, Prof. Richard Hoggart observes, “In the mass society one of the main channels through which the medium of communication work is, perhaps surprisingly, words… The paradox is that words today are both neglected in principle and hugely paid court to in fact. They are daily despoiled but secretly admired; they cannot be left alone by the whole congregation of advertising and P.R people and their related cohorts.” (Hoggart: Mass Media in a Mass Society (Myth and Reality); pp 141; 2005: Continuum, London.)
Citing examples of the manipulation of language by the corporate media, for twisting social realities and creating a make-believe social world, Richard Hoggart points out, “Shortly after the battles of in Kosovo began someone…a Cabinet Minister, introduced the word, ‘humanitarian.’ That was a proper epithet for the action he was justifying. The word proved …enormously attractive and was repeatedly adopted. From then it occurred in virtually every report from that theatre, over-used and as often, as not ill-used…it was a catch-all word for almost any aspect though often a dreadful one, of a war situation. One even spoke of mass murders in a village as a ‘humanitarian assault’. It was certainly human not humane…frequently misused in Afghanistan. Most often it was applied to assaults by those attacking the Taliban. They were ‘humanitarian assaults’….they were assaults in the pursuit of victor in battle and neither humanitarian nor humane. They were inevitably bloody and awful. (Ibid: pp146.)
Further, Hoggart points out that in the logical progression of the corporate media, “various simulacra will be offered and each hailed as the one and only true form of democracy. But it will be both diluted with the honest, gritty character of genuine democracy. It will not offer its citizens real freedom of choice-even to go to hell or much more day to day, to consistently blow the gaff on the powers that be-both of which must inhere in a democracy. Instead, its Gods will be: money, celebrity, power and all of us equal before the ‘hegemony’ of the balance-sheets. It will offer day after day what the persuaders have decided is good for their audiences in the pursuit of profit or of a docile citizenship (the two are naturally intimately related). It will offer at any given moment just what will be absorbed but not cause revulsion: soft porn today, but no doubt hard-core porn tomorrow, violent sex-and-violence dramas on television today but perhaps public executions tomorrow.” (Ibid: pp 170.)
The corporate establishment media in India is certainly doing this job dutifully. And if the Indian state is gleefully rubbing its hands in joy, it is because the corporate establishment media faithfully recycles myths churned out from propaganda services departments run by the State and corporate P.R. firms. The myths are glibly presented in the drawing rooms via newspapers and telly screens—be it the drilling of the American gospel of greed-never to stop needing more, or be it the glorification of freedom to cheat, to con, or be it the need to chuck villagers into a dust-bin for the so-called development, or be it the omnipresent spies from neighbouring countries training insurgents in Assam, or LTTE (now defunct but once a favourite bogey of intelligence agencies,) training Maoists.
Of course, some talks by harlequins in the media theatre, which seemingly are annoying but not harmful to the rulers are always allowed, the way C-grade film hero’s raving and ranting’ against corruption is allowed on the silver screens. After all the Indian corporate media rarely talks of the traumatic dirty diaspora of tribals, poor peasants or retrenched workers seeking refuge in the suppurating, festering and never closing wounds of dark dead streets snaking in the corners of ‘world-class,’ cities.
Nor do they ever state that Salwa Judum the so-called civilian para-military force, indulging in ‘counter-terror,’ is nothing but a sophisticated way to describe murder of adivasis or landless peasants. None of the corporate-run newspapers or news channels, ever reports the anger and helplessness of adivasis or tribals or peasants on being thrown out from their homelands. None of the them ever reports that security forces raping adivasi girls in mineral-rich forests of Odisha or Jharkhand, or women in north-east, or castrating children in an area coveted by corporates, is a part of the cold-blooded military strategy to subjugate people in the region to the wishes and diktats of the State.
Instead what they parrot is what they are told to parrot by corporates and its interest implementing department-the State. The corporate through its meta-reality concept called, ‘market,’ run countries as well as the State machinery. It is the new oppressor with a mask of democracy, pillaging and plundering country after country in the manner reminiscent of colonialism.
‘Market,’ is the miasmic lifeline, which corporate uses, to entwine every region wherever it smells profits and like a killing creeper it sees that the tree helping it reach sunlight remains on a firm ground with inhabitants providing it nourishment till they run dry. And till it leaches out the last drop of profit, it continues its stranglehold over the tree and branches, controlling its every sway and quivering of leaves.
Noted developmental sociologist Wolfgang Sachs states, “The world market, once brandished as a weapon against political tyranny, has itself become a closet dictator under dominion both rich and poor countries tremble...There is scarcely any country today which seems able to control its destiny; in this respect the differences between countries are only relative.” (Sachs: The Archaeology of the Development Idea; pp 37; 2008-Earthcare Books; Kolkatta.)
And in this scenario, “…the future appears grim and the South (read: Third World) is seen as the breeding ground of all crises…All kinds of dangers are to be found there...violence keeps exploding, the mafia is in command, epidemics are spreading, deserts are advancing, ideologies are rampant and everywhere the demographic bomb is looming…the more the threatening dangers strike fear into people’s minds, the more the image of ‘The Other’ takes on a different colouring. During the centuries it has been identified with the pagan, then with the savage, then with the indigenous and finally with the poor, which today embodies the ‘risk factor’.
“In these circumstances, the ‘development’ concept loses its reassuring connotations for the future; slowly it is being substituted by the concept of ‘security’—from the North’s viewpoint naturally,” and thus, “ Global security is beginning to justify anything—just as it united the international community against the dictator of Baghdad. Rich countries are now increasing their diplomatic charity and military instruments for risk prevention. But where there is no justice, there cannot be peace. Security has replaced development as the global guiding light-another tragic consequence of the continuing arrogance of power.” (Ibid pp 41-44.)
And it is this arrogance of power deeply laced with a desperation, to continue with the mirage of ‘market,’ and ‘development,’ the corporate paradigm that reduces every living being to a statistical abstraction on the scales of profit and loss, carries on with its exploitation and oppression under the guise of democratic security, by trying to annul every thought which it feels threatened with.
The corporate totalitarian system very survival lies in the control of people and communication of ideas and literature. Literature which is “harmful and anti-entropic,” in words of Zamyatin, does not need “dogs who “sit up” in expectation of a handout or because they fear the whip. Nor does it need trainers of such dogs. It needs writers who fear nothing…And it does not matter if this echo is individual…if a writer ignores such-and-such paragraph adopted at such-and-such conference. What matters is that his work be sincere, that I lead the reader forward…disturb the reader rather than reassure and lull his mind. “(Zamyatin: The Goal; quoted in Introduction to We translated by Mirra Ginsburg.)
Disconcerting wisdom is different from the inert information saturating the corporate controlled media. George Orwell in ‘Road to Wigan Pier,’ mentions that workers living in tattered trailers on being asked as to when they first came to know about their housing problems, answered, something like: When we were first told about it.
It is this realization of a possible awakening of an organic knowledge of exploitation and oppression, and consciousness of one’s fundamental rights, is what the ruling class fears. And so the censorship and banning of thoughts.
And thus the axe on Internet warriors who want to, like the heroine of ‘We,’ “… break down the Wall-all walls-to let the green wind blow free from end to end-across the earth.”(157pp.)
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