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.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Apollo,
Nice to see your article. Nice to see that Indians are seeing that they have some link to Americans. Have you seen in this recent war a link to us Israelis?
2 - Apollo
very much ruvy.infact the overwhelming public opinion in India is on Israel's side in this crisis.
We know what ur going thru since we have been thru that ourselves.
First the palestinians say that if u withdraw we will stop attacking u. then when u actually withdraw they say Ah! Ah! now that ur foolish enough to withdraw I will attack u.
Any compromise u make with this islamic fundamentalists is taken as a sign of weakness rather than an act of good faith.
Israel should not stop till it destroys the very root of the problem else it will keep haunting it for all time.
3 - Aniruddha Ghosh
All the Blogger entered in this world, and thought that there will be a liberty in expressing view and feellings, but currently there is a strong hold in this Blog technology to curbe it from the Govt. Side, giving excuse that the blogger are becoming terrorist or the terrorists are becoming blogge and they are exchanging their information through blog. It is funny to the Blogger because there are so many technologal media to despatch there data. So why not Govt. of India is not Banning those media, e.g. Telephone, E-mail, Fax, Mobilephone etc etc. So, it is better to strong the internal Security System and Soceity, you do not need to ban these all!
4 - David Richardson
I am a paralegal student at the University of Richmond researching tribal sovereignty concerning senate bill 480. My capstone project is federal recognition of Virginia Indian Tribes.
Because of documentary genocide in the forties Virginia tribes are seeking federal legislation rather than the BIA process.
I have constructed a blog to create a forum of legal students and professionals to discuss the facts and issues surrounding the Virginia Indian tribe's efforts.
All are invited to participate in this discussion.