The Bizarre Case of India Versus the Internet

The Republic bowed before the mob. Salman Rushdie could not have spoken in Jaipur, with UP elections around the corner. But the forced snapping of even a video-conference shocked the intelligentsia (the rest don't care). Even with the backing of rabid fanatics and opportunistic politicians, it seemed overkill for tackling one Indian-born author.

Yet a far more serious free-speech drama was quietly playing out. It started with Vinay Rai, editor of a little-known Delhi-based Urdu daily called Akbari, filing a criminal complaint in a district court in New Delhi.

Rai had been busy scouting the Internet for dirt. Surprise--he found it! On Google, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, BlogSpot, as well as on smaller services and blogs: Broadreader, Mylot, Zomie Time, Shyni Blog, Exbii.com, and IMC India.

And so he filed a criminal complaint against-hold your breath-Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Larry Page of Google, Donald Edward Graham, chairman of Facebook and the Washington Post, Yahoo chairman Roy J Bostock, the Indian country heads of those organizations, and others. He did so “in public interest and as an affected person who believes in a secular India.”

And why? Because “these accused persons knowingly well these facts that these contents and materials are most dangerous for the community and peace of the harmony,” says Rai's criminal complaint (language unedited), “but with common and malafide intention and hands under glove with each other failed to remove the same for the wrongful gain.”

In my first and only meeting with Rai on a recent prime-time show, Rai sounded placative. He is not trying to get anything “banned”. He merely wants removed all content that offends him.

So would he be the sole arbiter of offensive content? How would India's jurisdiction cover all these sites in the US? Questions like these got his goat, and at one point he snapped out to a fellow-panelist and blogger that we wanted to instigate riots. The show host asked him about his remarkable coincidence of timing, language and intent with those of the government, and Kapil Sibal: Was he their agent? No, he said. I am an Agent of the People.

I had not read the complaint submitted before the district court in Delhi. I did so, two days later. The “agent of the people” was being economical with the truth. Nowhere in his plaint did he seek removal of content. Instead, he outlined a conspiracy between authors and the respondents to “malice and defame India with intention to spread communal violence to destabilize the country with”.

His goal is modest: that Ballmer, Page, et al, be summoned, brought from across the world to the court in Delhi, charged, prosecuted, and punished under the Indian Penal Code sections 153(A), 153(B), 292, 293, 295(A), 298,109, 500 and 120B.

Anyone remotely familiar with the Internet would dismiss this as bizarre, the ravings of a fanatic on the fringes, a bit-player journalist aspiring to ten minutes of fame.

But the issue goes beyond that. This petitioner likely has establishment support. So even if the present complaint is unlikely to find favor with the high court, or, worst case, the supreme court, this could be the shape of things to come in India-an India which aspires to be China.

And the Delhi High Court's Justice Suresh Kait, clearing the deck for the prosecution of Facebook, Google, et al, said on January 12: “Like China, we could block all such websites” that do not remove offensive content. Kapil Sibal would have rejoiced.