« Intelligence Failure | HomePage | Omkara »
07/25/2006
Censorship
There was this recent issue of Indian blogs being banned by the ISPs and the government for some ostensibly anti-national activities. Expectedly, there has been a lot of condemnation in the media and now as I understand the ban has now been lifted as quietly as it was imposed. This got me thinking on where do we stand as a nation on censorship.
As far as I know, our governments have practiced various forms of implicit and explicit censorship and there is no reason for them to stop doing so. Apart from the well-known cases, censorship affects us in our day-to-day interaction with the government also. Everyday in the newspaper I see so many examples of censorship. For example, the government will announce some big public project or other and in 99.99% of the cases, there is no mention of when the project is planned to be completed. There is all the information about the size of the project, the number of jobs it will create and its proclaimed benefits but nothing on when it will be completed. Therefore, when you do not give out completion dates then there is no way that you can calculate project time overruns etc. Yes, you could argue that this is not censorship in its true sense but to me it is the same mind bent which does censorship and which suppresses information. There is also the Right to Information Act, which after the current changes taking out file notings is a shadow of its formal self.
Personally, I think there is too much being made out of this blog-blocking episode. I am also a little upset that I am not on blogspot and so my blog was up and running through this entire “crisis”. Obviously, blogspirit is not cool enough. Maybe its time for me to move to blogspot and hope that my blog will get blocked too and I get quoted on national TV on how my fundamental rights have been snatched away from me. Maybe I can add that to my CV.
04:45 Permalink | Email this