The fine art of irreverently distorting dear leaders? portraits dates back to the pre-Internet era; some of India?s older walls will attest to this. Perhaps our communications & information technology minister inhabits a cocoon where such irreverence escaped his eyes, until now. Kapil Sibal has now spotted morphed images of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi on social media and he is determined to take them down?if similar desecrations are being visited upon opposition leaders, the minister remains blissfully oblivious. He has told senior functionaries of these Websites (Facebook, Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, et al) to start filtering such ?defamatory? content. He has also called such content ?inflammatory?. It is a pity that India?s IT minister appears unfamiliar with the ubiquity of ?flaming? in the Internet era, and the impossibility of censoring it. For example, Facebook has more than 800mn active users and 10,000 tweets have been recorded in a second. To expect staffers to pre-screen objectionable content, especially in the context of what seems to be a matter of individual taste rather than lawfulness, seems ridiculous today and will appear even more ridiculous tomorrow. After all, said Websites have made it clear that they would abide by government prosecution of objectionable uploads. The desirability of handing over all citizens? freedom of expression to some techies is dubious in any case.
Just last month, when Benetton ran the Unhate campaign featuring morphed images of Barack Obama locking lips with Hu Jintao, Binyamin Netanyahu with Mahmoud Abbas, etc, no national government bothered to take exception. When the telecom authority in Pakistan, where texting has become a dominant means of mass communication, came up with a list of 1,600 ?obscene? words that wireless service provides were expected to ban, it won nothing but lampoons aplenty. Autocratic regimes? efforts to micromanage 21st century communication from the Middle East to China have drawn derision in India. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg?s law is holding: every year, people are sharing twice as much information as the previous year. The future of the world is set to be determined by citizens who just don?t know life before the Internet. Democracy, transparency and entrepreneurship are all being renegotiated in light of new technology. Yes, so are the challenges of privacy and security. But knee-jerk, parochial reactions just reduce the tone of this conversation, much like the flame wars that Sibal would probably seek to censor if he knew anything about them.
