All for free speech

BY sevanti ninan| IN Media Freedom | 31/07/2006

Reprinted from The Hindu, July 30, 2006   

MEDIA MATTERS

Sevanti Ninan

THE point about all those noisy, angry comparisons with China and Singapore that were made after blogging sites were blocked by Indian Internet service providers for a week or so, is that we could all access the criticism, over TV, print and on the Internet. You would not have been able to do that in China. Indian public opinion is vociferous: whether it is clumsy Internet censorship gone wrong or a foolishly heavy-handed broadcast bill. And in every case, the state backs off. That would not happen either in China or Singapore. Free speech is too ingrained here to be curtailed by broadbrush censorship or regulation though individual repression still happens. Iftikhar Gilani, the Hindi and Urdu version of whose book My Days in Prison was launched last week, would testify to that.

Indian bloggers went to town (with a lot of support from the press) when the blocking happened last fortnight in the aftermath of the Mumbai blasts. It instantly became an international cause celebre. But whether it was in 2003, when the first official blocking of an Internet site happened, or now; the truth is that the ham-handedness with which it is done invites a media blitz that ensures that censorship or intimidation of the press by the state is not tenable for long. That is also true of the broadcasting bill, which the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting backtracked on last fortnight. It was supposed to do nasty things to cable channels and their distributors.

But there was too much of an outcry. In dealing with the media, India`s democratic polity backs off from repression when there is publicity and pressure. Those who doubt it should look at some examples from other democracies.

We don`t hear much in India about Tayseer Allouni, the Spanish journalist of Syrian origin who has been sentenced to seven years in prison in Spain. He is the Al Jazeera correspondent who was the first to interview Osama Bin Laden (in Afghanistan) after 9/11 happened. A Spanish court convicted him of collaborating with the Al Qaeda. Spanish prosecutors have accused Allouni of couriering funds from an Al-Qaeda supporter in Spain to collaborators in Afghanistan. The charges against him have received little credence from those who know him. As a journalist Allouni had a reputation for unflinching frontline coverage from Afghanistan. Nonetheless last month the Spanish Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling sentencing him to jail. His first sentence drew widespread condemnation and last year international pressure made the Spanish government move him to house arrest. But in the long run the Spanish courts and government have remained unmoved and he is now back in prison, serving a seven year sentence for having got an amazing scoop.

Or take the story filed last fortnight by an Associated Press writer in Jerusalem on the censorship Israel routinely subjects media organisations to. That is the condition for being allowed to operate in the country at all times, not just when there is an active military engagement going on. During the war against the Hezbollah there are many stories about what is happening to the Israeli side, which simply will not get used. Its chief military censor, who happens to be a woman, has the power to put journalists in jail. As someone from Index of Censorship comments in the AP story, Israel`s censorship rules are not unusual, it is unusual in that they are enforced.

Then there are the press censorship laws the Americans have set up in Iraq, apart from the press censorship the American government imposes on the US press, about Iraq.

As for India`s incensed bloggers, they are better off in India than they would be in the long run in the United States. Journalist, filmmaker and blogger Rory O Conner recently posted a report on his blog about the Pentagon`s efforts to create a blog search engine, which would be a terror-fighting tool. A defence contractor has been asked to create a topic-specific blog search and analytic tool, which will be able to analyse links and patterns within the blogosphere. To what end? To look for ?actionable information? in blog postings. As the major in the Air Force office funding the research put it, ?We definitely want to use this to monitor Islamic blogs. It`s important to understand other cultures, and blogs give insight into them.? What tracking blogs in this fashion will mean for the blogs in which the U.S. government develops an interest, is a crucial question. As O Conner puts it, the potential for the abuse of the blog project is strong.

In India websites like dalistan.org, Clickatell.com, and Hinduhumanrights.org, which were ordered blocked after the Mumbai blasts remain blocked. But that is different from wholesale censoring of journalists or bloggers. Because whether hate mongering should get the protection of free speech remains debatable.