To Kapil Sibal, With Love - Deep Throat

In a couple of days from now (on December 15) Kapil Sibal is scheduled to hold a round-table conference with Internet giants Google, Facebook, Microsoft and maybe some more. Let’s just call these companies ISPs. Sibal’s stated purpose is have these companies develop new guidelines that will keep obscene and abusive content off the internet. He also has problems with such content being posted by anonymous people. CNN-IBN and NDTV through their interviews with the minister have helped defend his actions and deny that he had called for “pre-screening” of content, although the whole world is now quite clear that what he attempted was a grand scheme of ‘political censorship’ mainly to protect Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi from being criticised or made fun of on the net.

KaranThapar’s ‘massage’ can be read here at the CNN-IBN site. Like I mentioned in my previous post the Indian media had blacked out news of various meetings Sibal had with the ISPs and it took the NYT to ‘leak’ the news. Karan Thapar even went to the extent of asking Sibal if NYT was “getting at him”! Getting at him? Getting at him for what? Here, a journalist is implying that there might be motives for the NYT article even when Sibal himself hadn’t suggested it. That’s Indian media for you. Here’s the answer for Karan Thapar: Reporting news of devious plans of the govt. is called “news reporting” and reporting it is the only motive. There need not be other motives to report news as may be the case for some Indian media outlets and journalists. Heather Timmons who broke the news in NYT seems to have jokingly told Sibal's office they were just keeping them on their toes.Well, that's what media is supposed to do, unlike CNN-IBN which searches for "motives". Thapar further asks if NYT confirmed the story with Sibal before publishing. That is truly the height of stupidity by Thapar. Are newspapers supposed to confirm stories with wrong doers when they might have “reliable sources”? Haven’t the greatest stories come from “reliable sources”? Importantly, nowhere in the whole interview with Thapar does Sibal deny or refute the story of NYT. To top it all Kapil Sibal responded stating he doesn’t want to attribute motives but the “circumstantial evidence” is clear. Aha! Circumstantial evidence that Sibal was about to commit a major offence was pretty much exposed.

 

Here’s another exchange:

Karan Thapar: Let's then come back to what you say was your central focus, blasphemous and offensive content on these Internet platforms. When did you first raise this issue with the Internet platform?

Kapil Sibal: Way back on the September 5 we raised this issue and we circulated some of the content that was blasphemous, that you mentioned, and demeaning. They agreed with it and we said let’s start a dialogue and come back to us within four weeks.

Needless to mention, Sibal had started out this venture by showing off dirty pictures of Sonia Gandhi to the ISP heads and had then turned it around to dangers of “communal violence” owing to content on the net. Laughable! There is an important term Sibal uses for which it would be even fair to hang him. He says he circulated content that was “blasphemous”! Blasphemous? Against whom or against what religion? India does not have a blasphemy law so how in the world does Sibal make such statements. Is this some Islamic country? People may be killed in Pakistan and other Islamic countries but India definitely does not have blasphemy laws. This is what the honourable minister would like to bring into India?

Then again, Sibal has a problem with ‘Anonymity’ on the internet for the objectionable content that he cites. Okay! On the night of June 4 thousands of innocent protesters were assaulted by the police at the Ramlila grounds in Delhi. These were not anonymous rodents. These were humans in flesh and blood. The protesters were neither violent nor threatened violence. Will Sibal answer why these dissenting voices were dealt with so violently? Karan Thapar did not ask him that question. This Congress govt simply wants to shut out any kind of dissent. The attack on Ramlila crowd resulted in the death of an innocent woman. Did any head roll for it? What happened at Ramlila is symbolic of a govt that wants to shut out dissent everywhere. It is not pornography or obscenity that really bothers Kapil Sibal. The fact that people are angry and trashing this govt and their secretive Gandhis on the net does bother him.

Following the exposure of Sibal’s grand scheme to shut off dissent Outlook magazine published many of the pics that have floated on the net for quite a while. There might be more. If you look closely, these pics are humorous and funny rather than offensive. Sure, one might say some are in ‘bad taste’ but surely, bad taste is neither illegal nor punishable. The one pic that Outlook missed was “BhrashtAchar” (Referring to Corruption by politicians with Sonia Gandhi’s image) and that humorously conveys the corruption that has so become synonymous with the Congress. And usually such pics and content generally fade away after a few laughs but Sibal has made sure these will be saved and circulated a lot more than before. Such is the stupidity of his action. As far as anonymity goes there is a brilliant post by RealityCheck India, titled “Thank you Google” which completely destroys the premise on which Sibal partly makes his arguments.

Sibal then talks about child pornography being a serious problem on the net. I dare him to name even one ISP he met which allows child pornography. Every ISP has strict rules and guidelines against child pornography and does not allow such content. If they come across such content the user is permanently banned. Even regular adult content comes with a warning of the content being so. So Sibal doesn’t really fool anyone. Even so, in the US pedophilia is not a free speech issue. In fact, Amazon.com was selling a book titled "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct". This was withdrawn due to consumer protest and not because it broke any law. So Sibal must rest assured people have a better sense of the limits and what to reject.

Finally, on the issue of porn and anonymity let me assure Sibal that even porn stars mostly carry screen names and not their real names. Believe it or not, the title of the first commercially successful feature porn film in the USA was also involved in a way in bringing down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. The deep source from the FBI that fed important leaks to Bob Woodward was nicknamed “Deep Throat” by one of his group editors as he was a deep source and at the time the porn movie of the same name was commercially doing well. For over three decades that anonymous source was the greatest secret in the world. It’s only the late W. Mark Felt, former Deputy Director of FBI himself revealed that he was deep throat. Have a laugh Mr. Sibal, there might be deep throats in the Congress who are leaking information to the NYT and other journals. As for the Congress, trying to silence the Internet won’t help. Honest governance might help!

How Indian MSM Blacked-out Sibal's Grand Scheme

It is hard to imagine that almost a whole generation of kids in Kashmir may have grown up without watching a movie in a cinema theatre. That is what religious extremism brings about. The Kashmiri Hurriyat separatist leader, Syed Geelani, even considers it “immoral” to watch movies. No wonder kids in the valley find stone-pelting such a thrilling and rewarding experience. Geelani is not the only one who believes censorship and bans make for a healthy society. The latest one to join the moral brigade is union minister Kapil Sibal. Much has been already said and written about Sibal’s move to censor social networks so I won’t add to it. It was enough for the hashtag #IdiotKapilSibal trend for nearly two days on Twitter. Not surprisingly, Sibal’s stupidity was exposed on the same day that an Islamic cleric residing in Europe said that women should not be close to bananas or cucumbers, in order to avoid any “sexual thoughts.”

Sibal’s anger is understandable, if you were Sonia Gandhi's protector. The mainstream media (MSM) in India have for long resisted any form of regulation but they have successfully managed ‘self-censorship’. The social networks refuse to self-censor themselves. And at the centre of this all is Sonia Gandhi. The MSM won’t publish anything remotely critical about SoniaG or question any of her actions. The secrecy of SG’s illness and surgery or whatever it was can only be protected by a servantile MSM as that in India.

Two previous posts on this blog detail the manner in which our MSM suppresses any mention of Sonia Gandhi: “Why Is Indian Media Scared Of Sonia Gandhi?” and “Rajdeep Sardesai : "No Wild Allegations Against Gandhis, Please...." Far from talking about or questioning Sonia Gandhi, our MSM actually protects her against such acts. To speak about SG is a sin! To question her, to ridicule her, to paint funny ugly pictures of her is blasphemy for Kapil Sibal.

What most of us totally missed in the whole episode was that Sibal was meeting the heads of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft etc. over the last six weeks or so. Yet there was no mention of these meetings anywhere in the Indian media or the transactions. Most of these internet giants are huge advertisers and would have thought our media would have spoken up for them. None! Even the last meeting by Sibal with these networks was not reported by the Indian media. Yes indeed, they blacked out the news! It took the New York Times to report the meeting and demands of Kapil Sibal.

Once the NYT broke the news the Indian MSM had no option but to relay the story and then all the editors and anchors of our spineless news media start moralising and sermonising about freedom of speech. This is once the Twitterati collectively put Sibal on their lap and spanked him. This is a senior minister we are talking about. One can rest assured that many journalists hang around his office for bits and pieces of sound-bites and yet none reported the meeting with the network heads. One prominent Congress friendly channel even had an exclusive interview with the Indian head of Google during the same period and yet remained silent about Sibal’s grand plan.

NYT reports about the first meeting six weeks ago: “At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi.  “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites”. But once this news got out both Kapil Sibal and the Indian media weren’t talking about the SG factor. It was all about SG and objectionable content that create communal tensions. Trust Sibal and the Congress to give it all a communal twist and colour.

I doubt Sibal can ever stop freedom on the internet. He might well take a warning from the kids in Kashmir. If the youth and all the people who vent their anger in various forms on the net are stopped they might be out on the streets and pelting stones too. Far from creating tensions the net allows people to let off steam and keep violence off the streets. As for dirty pictures or obscene content there are enough laws in the country to prosecute offenders.

At the time of writing, Google has already received an IT notice. More might follow. Ironically, and I say this with deep sympathy and not out of sarcasm, Kapil Sibal was hit on his eye in the parliament on the next day the news about his censorship plans broke. His eye was injured accidentally by the sharp edge of a folder flipped by a colleague. So at least for a while Sibal will not see evil comfortably on the net. But the manner in which Indian MSM suppresses any news concerning the deceptive and nefarious plans of the Congress does stand exposed again. Maybe 100% FDI in media should also be considered along with other reforms.