Sena ire on FB posts: Any new lessons here?

Its déjà vu…or almost. A mob of the Shiv Sena went to ransack the residence of a person who, they suspected, had posted content allegedly offensive to their deceased leader Bal Thackeray.

 

They climbed over the gates and walls of a building society in Kalyan, Thane district, orth-east of Mumbai. According to reports, Sena workers were ‘roaming the streets’ looking for the author of the post and finally settled on someone who ‘liked’ it – a bank employee Dhananjay Pathak whose wife told police his account may have been hacked into!

 

There are conflicting reports about the post itself. One, that it made some allegedly derogatory comments about the Shiv Sena’s stand against North Indians. Another quoted the complainant, the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena leader, Vikas Repale that the “post’s creator had insinuated that our party had taken advantage of people's sentiments by using the name of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, and said objectionable things about our Saheb.”

 

What exactly did the posts say? Well, we don’t know and can’t judge for ourselves since the local police got the cyber crime cell to block the page. The police have taken Pathak in for questioning and hope they will find the post’s author through him. 

 

Thus far, the police, cautioned by the strong strictures against the police by the Mumbai High Court after the arrest of students Shaheen Dhada and her Facebook friend Renu Srinivasan, the police did what it is supposed to: control the unruly mob and promised to investigate the complaint before actually taking action. Now comes the alarming news that the mob may have got the wrong person!So perhaps the police have learnt caution is the better part of their earlier enthusiasm. 

 

Last year, after the arrests of the two young women in Palghar district of Thane, the Union government issuedguidelines that, with regard to complaints under Sec 66 (a) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, no arrests will be effected unless approved by a senior officer (a DCP in urban and rural areas and an Inspector General-level officer in metros).

 

Of course, one may well argue that this is no guarantee against the misuse of what is clearly a bad law. Its wordings are vague and arbitrary, providing a sweeping range of terms and language that can cause ‘annoyance’ enough to sufficiently ‘offend’ someone, somewhere.  If hundreds of people are then offended or annoyed or feel harassed at some comments and decide to take the law into their hands to defend their feelings, it would be naïve to imagine no action at all from a police officer, however senior?

 

Last week, the Information and Broadcasting minister Manish Tewari said that the government was not in favour of regulation or policing of the internet. However, global rules of engagement must be framed, he said. He cited instances of online content that spurred the exodus of North Eastern citizens last year and the recent Muzzafarnagar riots as examples of the misuse of online media.

 

But clamping down on online content is not the way to go about preserving peace on the ground. It is about time law enforcers realize this.