You provoke, I swat
If the department of telecom blocked sites on government orders, should it change the way it does things? Set a time limit on the life of blocks imposed without due process?
SEVANTI NINAN says the government needs to review its response to last month’s crisis.
Reprinted from Mint, September 6, 2012
TALKING MEDIA
Sevanti Ninan
Media power is a noisy insect under the upheld paw of an elephant called the state. Most of the time that enormous paw quivers and draws back. Sometimes it comes down when the elephant panics. One such occasion occurred last month.
August, and the lessons of its latter half are behind us. Time for a post-mortem somebody said at a meeting this week where two solitary representatives of the Government of India turned up to meet a variety of people described as ‘multi-stakeholders’. Shorthand for internet service providers, Google and Facebook, civil society advocates of free speech and better laws, lawyers, telecom industry people, and journalists. All those affected by last month’s arbitrary government action on the internet. Missing of course from the designated stakeholders were the citizenry whose actions had triggered both the cause and the effects of the emergency.
Of the two representatives of the GOI who came, one was obdurate, the other conciliatory. . “It was our first emergency” the bureaucrats said, of their mass use of Internet blocking provisions. Neither represented the Home Ministry, the mighty body which propelled the elephant’s paw to come down with undifferentiated zeal on a long list of sites, pages, twitter handles. The emergency has passed, time for help-us-do-better-next-time noises. More than that perhaps, time to dissect the forces complicating the life of a nation.
Information technology has potency. You can use a digital network to mobilise people for a positive cause, or for an assault, or to trigger panic. You can use them to defuse panic too, which is the challenge being thrown at government now. But that calls for a change in the personality and training of the behemoth that is the state. Can a body whose foot soldiers cannot even apply a law accurately to situations on the ground, suddenly acquire the brains and gumption to use technology imaginatively? May be they can, if key individuals at the helm of the next emergency have the required calibre. But that is a big if. There has been much talk of what the British home ministry and British police did during the London riots. But the genes, mindset and scale are different here.
Between the agility of digital networks, the un-calibrated might of the state, the insularity of ethnicity, and the cacophony of what passes for media, we had what might have been called a situation, had it been smaller in scale or less tragic in its import. What it turned out to be instead was a fairly terrifying public emergency. Terrifying in how vulnerable and skittish it suddenly renders larger groups of people. An inspired essayist (Raghu Karnad) evoked images of trains laden with panic exactly sixty five years after Partition. Perhaps an overblown comparison, but if rumours triggered panic then, think of the damage technologies which spread them now with much greater speed and efficiency, can do. He also made the significant point that the wider Northeast community is so used to bonding over a digital network that its people turn to that network before they think of tipping off the police. So no early warnings came.
But to return to the post mortem question, will a government battling a new crisis inside parliament and outside find the mindspace to commission a quick one and study what it shows? Or will a civil society institution do it?
This week’s meeting organised by FICCI (the Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry) threw up questions and ideas. Since the print media did not do enough to investigate where the rumours were coming from or who was spreading them, we now need to know what the intelligence shows on exactly who the offenders were. How could sms have been deployed differently--less restriction and more proactive state messaging to calm things down?
If the department of telecom blocked sites on government orders, should it change the way it does things? Set a time limit on the life of blocks imposed without due process, help the home ministry to be less ham-handed in the way it draws up its list, adopt transparency measure like telling us exactly why a site is blocked? Have a mixed group of advisors who can be mobilised for emergency situations which includes people other than cops and bureaucrats? Including members of the free speech brigade who now have the luxury of crying foul, without any responsibility for law and order?
To give the elephant credit, if it is aware of its might, it is also increasingly mindful of how speedily its misuse draws public wrath in an age where everybody is empowered with digital media, internet or mobile. And apart from public ire, the GOI is wary of media ire. So it will probably be wise enough to also keep Justice Markandey Katju, now spoiling for the Press Council to take over social media and TV regulation, at bay.
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