Not even a month after Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra was arrested for circulating a cartoon on West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, it has now emerged that an alternative media was gagged quite a while ago.
A mobile-based text messaging service, the Dodhichi Newsletter, is the one that came under the scanner of the Bengal government, aftert it disseminated information about it cancelling permission to Association for Protection of Democratic Rights to hold a public meeting in Kolkata.
A media report quoted its director, Dr Shyamal Ray, saying, "Dodhichi Newsletter is a Kolkata-based cellphone text messaging service, disseminating information, news, and views not appearing in the mainstream media."
"Our service provides a platform to hundreds of freelance news-gatherers, social and cultural activists, and NGOs, and reaches out to a select list of thousands of message receivers, among them MPs, MLAs, ministers, political leaders as well as eminent personalities in various fields," Ray, apparently, stated in a letter addressed to the Home Secretary of the Union Government.
In addition, said the report by The Hoot, Ray complained to the Centre, "On April 9, we discovered that most of our SIM cards (57 of them) had suddenly been deactivated, causing us to suspend our service and of a great deal of inconvenience to those availing of it. The service provider (DoCoMo) when contacted, could not give us a credible explanation."
Dodhichi is still running the service, though in a small way, with SIMs from a different service provider. It has been operational since 2010.