The Indian government in the aftermath of the Mumbai bombings on July 11th, 2006 sent a circular dated July 13th to the nearly 150 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in India asking them to ban 20 websites/blogs. The ISPs of India, for all the talk of India's IT prowess, did not seem to possess the requisite technology to block only the sub-domains and "mistakenly" blocked entire domains like Blogspot.com, Typepad.com and Geocities.com.

Many Indian bloggers and netizens have their blogs on these sites and they found their own blogs inaccessible. The engraged Indian blogger community got together and formed the Bloggers Collective and opposed this move tooth and nail. The issue snowballed into a huge controversy and was widely reported by the mainstream media across the world.

The reason dished out by the government for this move was that the free anonymous services being provided by these websites were being misused by the terrorists to communicate among themselves and coordinate attacks and the sites were blocked only temporarily for about 48 hours to track these elements. The Indian bloggers skeptical of these ham-handed explanations filed a Right To Information application and obtained the list that was circulated to the ISPs.

What was revealed was quite astonishing, although knowing the DNA of this leftist government, was not very surprising. Here is the link to the photocopy of the circular and the complete list of the banned sites.

The list has at least five dead URLs and one Japanese language blog. The list has ONLY ONE leftwing website (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), Dalitstan.org, which specialises in conspiracy theories and other back to front reasoning and mindless rants usually associated with radical left-wingers. The list even has some misspelled URLs which means that the actual sites like imamali.com, merrimusings and commonfolkscommonsense are still accessible. This does not exactly raise our confidence in the cold-blooded efficiency of our Government.

Besides these, every one of the remaining sites are either American or Indian right wing sites, certainly not the type where you will find Osama bin laden and General/President Pervez Musharraf or their foot soldiers exchanging love notes to each other. Especially since they can very well meet for a sumptuous meal in the presidential palace of Islamabad.