Dear Government of India, if you must censor the Internet, can you please do with a bit more style and technical savvy? Maybe by spending a bit of money asking Cisco to build you a decent firewall? Hamhanded efforts like these to censor Internet access kinda kill India’s rep as a “software superpower”. Maybe you can get cybersavvy folk like SM Krishna or Chandrababu Naidu to consult before writing dumb memos like these? Yours very sincerely, a scandalized Indian Internet User.

Some background: Essentially, the government of India directs Indian ISP Dishnet to block one group in Yahoogroups. Dishnet, displaying that it can bend over and take it better than anyone else, blocks the whole of Yahoo Groups. It is not known if other ISPs like VSNL were similarly directed — they seem to be allowing that URL just fine. Posts on india-gii have pointed out that Dishnet could have blocked only that URL, but at the cost of increasing the strain on their own routers, so that was probably why the blanket block approach was chosen, freedom of expression for the rest of their customers be damned.

The blocked group seems to be (according to this post by Suresh Subramaniam on the india-gii list) a mailing list started by an ethnic minority outfit in Meghalaya, and cribs about how corrupt the Indian government is, how public money is swallowed up, etc. All I can say is if issues like these have to be censored by the Indian government, then the Indian press had better watch out, it is headed for the gulag in short order.

Another interesting point is contents of the fax itself — Mr J Random Bureaucrat is “directed to convey the approval of competent authority” that the group be blocked. Who is this competent authority? What process did they follow while deciding that this group be blocked? Was Due Process™ with respect to Article 19(1)(a) observed? Were constitutional experts consulted? Such questions are Best Not Asked in the world’s largest democracy.

What also surprised me was the outrage, or rather the lack of it, in groups such as the india-gii. There almost seems to be relief that the mai-baap sarkar has decided to block only one group, and not the whole site. I’m not going to get into slippery-slope arguments here, but will point out that things like these set a precedent, and if it’s going to be a little ethnic minority in Meghalaya today, it can be google.com tomorrow.