17 Feb 2014 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal called off the 30-hour protest (Dharna) outside Rail Bhavan on January 21, 2014 after few of his demands were considered.
Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s erstwhile chief minister, gained popularity among the ‘aam aadmi’ – ordinary citizens – because of his tough anti-corruption stand. Many saw his newly formed party, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as a breath of fresh air. His antics and strategies to grab media attention didn’t disappoint either.
During his campaign for Delhi’s highest seat, he cut off electricity wires outside peoples homes to mark his defiance of what he said are corrupt electricity meters that overcharge people. Once in office, he sat in protest against Delhi’s own police force, demanding that the Central Government that controls the Police in Delhi, the country’s capital, immediately transfer its control to his government. Kejriwal has become an urban icon. Always wrapped in his trademark muffler, with a seemingly constant cough, his image is being parodied intensely on the internet. He insisted on being sworn in as Chief Minister of Delhi, in an open –to-all public function at one of Delhi’s biggest grounds instead of at the office of the Lt. Governor of Delhi, as is practice. For a while, he was adamant about holding a special session of the Delhi Assembly, called for legislating the Jan Lokpal Bill seeking to establish an anti-corruption ombudsman, in one of the capital’s largest stadium instead of inside the Assembly itself. On 14th February, after unsuccessfully trying to introduce the Jan Lokpal Bill on the first day of Delhi’s State Assembly, he held a press conference in the pouring rain to announce that he was resigning over this issue. This capped his 49 day tenure, and just before ending his press conference, he declared that che is ready to “sacrifice his life for the country” in his fight against corruption.
In terms of theatrics that inescapably accompanies his politics, Kejriwal is caught the imagination of India’s common man. He is always on television. That any politician willingly resigned as chief minister will not be lost on Indians, used to seeing politicians hang onto power with dear life. Many are looking to Kejriwal to make a sizable dent in the national elections, projected to be held in April 2014.
While campaigning and during this term in office, Kejriwal unveiled an arsenal of ideas to battle status quo – and take on people in authority head on – including his idea of asking the common man to use the mobile phone as a “weapon” to secretly film government and police officials demanding bribes. This proof then could be turned over to his government, which had set up an exclusive hotline to deal with corruption charges. Don’t get mad, get even – seems to be his motto as he urged residents of Delhi, “setting kar lo” – or fix them.
Media reports confirm that as a result of “open season on sting operations” the sale of spycams have increased in Delhi, with some shopkeepers estimating that the sale of these hidden cameras have shot up almost 90%. Spy cameras are available in the form of pens, keyrings, buttons, watches, pen-drives and eyeglasses, and on a more expensive scale, in jewellery and other bespoke items.
This isn’t the first time AAP has recommended the use of spycameras. Days before the New Delhi vote, the media reported that AAP were fitting slums with spycams to ensure that candidates of other parties did not go there to try and buy votes – and if they did – they would be caught. Over 2,000 spycams were reportedly used for this operation.
The AAP party is not the first — and certainly won’t be the last — in suggesting the use of cameras, especially through mobile phones, for citizen empowerment. In fact, when Delhi’s traffic police first launched a page on Facebook, citizens began posting pictures of cops breaking traffic laws in hopes that they be reprimanded. Similarly when the Municipal Corporation of Delhi started its Facebook page, people took advantage of the platform to post pictures of shoddy or incomplete works in their neighbourhoods.
Community video project, India Unheard, has armed citizen journalists from small towns and villages with cameras, and they report on development and other issues, and publish these videos on the internet. In many areas, due to the spotlight on them, government officials have responded to these negative reports and taken action. The parent outfit, Video Volunteers, even ran a campaign to check the “real” progress of India’s Right to Education Act, by bringing out over 100 videos that document the real implementation of this act on the ground.
The use of technology “from below” to hold those in power accountable is also known as sousveillance, a word that comes the French word “sous” (from below) with the word “viller” coined in 1998 by Professor Steve Mann of the University of Toronto. In the West, sousveillance is being looked at by some as an foil to mass surveillance; a manner in which citizens can watch those watching them. Others, however, express some doubts at a society where citizens are pointing cameras at a state that is watching them, and perhaps ultimately leading to a situation where everyone is watching each other. Surveillance is normalized because it is so institutionalized.
However, sousveillance is not necessarily targeted towards government and law enforcement officials alone. In New York, a project called Hollaback asks women to take pictures of their harassers and upload it to their site. The movement has expanded and extends to Indian cities as well. And gadgets like Google Glass will make humans capable of recording their perspectives on a 24/7 basis, amassing huge data.
So it appears that at a time when civil society is up in arms against big brother surveillance schemes run by the government because of their privacy breaches, we are simultaneously doing the same to ourselves, with what some call little brother surveillance.
Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at ACLU writes, “Under the old expectation, the default expectation was that any given event would not be photographed… That is rapidly being replaced by a new mindset in which the default expectation is that something taking place in public will be recorded. Thus you often hear expressions of disappointment when a disputed or dramatic public event is NOT caught on video.” He also raises the point that citizen video footage might give the state a reason to scale down their mass surveillance activities, because video evidence can simply be collected from private photos and videos. However, it seems unlikely, given what we know about governments world wide, that most countries will be ready to give up their schemes to the off-chance that somebody-recorded-it.
Of course, one can argue there is a subtle difference between CCTV cameras that clearly announce their existence, people pointing mobile phones at each other on the street, and the proliferation of spycams to “fix” people. There is also legitimacy attached to this process when the chief minister of a state asks its citizens to collect proof of wrongdoing as the basis of taking action, as has been done in New Delhi. In fact, in a speech made just about three weeks after he took office, Kejriwal announced that he is quite sure that corruption must have come down at least 20-30% in Delhi, to thunderous applause. A helpline the new government has set up even offers to tutor citizens in how to conduct sting operations against corrupt officials. In an editorial by the Indian Express, the paper advises that, “Sting operations are an ethical minefield. They are based on lies and entrapment, even if in the service of a larger cause. They are easy to manipulate at several levels, including editing to convey the desired impression of a meeting. This unease about the subterfuge and distortion of using undercover cameras is the reason stings are not admissible as legal evidence. How can they be the basis of prompt government action, then?”
The truth is that India has a problem of entrenched corruption, and the AAP’s ride and subsequent anti-graft ideas address these concerns head on. Previously India’s Central Vigilance Commission in 2010, had encouraged people to conduct stings on government officials, even as a draft privacy law, yet to be passed by the Indian parliament, said such operations could violate individual privacy. Others worry that programs like these need protections such as a Whistleblowers Act and provisions to protect anonymity. However, the concept of sting operations, made popular by a vigilante media has become so popular that there is now an Indian website that collates India sting operations for anyone to see.
The government of India’s capital is installing more and more CCTVs for safety reasons, the Central Monitoring System is being deployed to track citizens online behavior, and now the Delhi government is glorifying sting operations through radio ads and billboards. Ultimately, the AAP, consciously or unconsciously, has given its vote to a society based on sousveillance.
Can the encouragement of spycams and secret mobile tapings end up in people spying on neighbours, and perhaps even blackmail them? Could Delhi’s public spaces shrink because of the “spycam moral police”? Are adequate privacy frameworks in place?
The AAP needs to think about these questions, especially if it plans to field these ideas during the national election campaign trail.
Point and shoot are never orders to be given lightly.
This article was published on 17 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
13 Feb 2014 | India, News and features, Politics and Society
The Indian judiciary, with its prickly ego and halo of righteousness, has always wielded the sword of “contempt” in a swashbuckling manner.
In 1995, the movie Gentleman had some scenes in which judges were shown as being subservient to politicians, and susceptible to bribery. The filmmaker had two options- delete those “offending” scenes, or face prison for contempt of court. Needless to say, he settled for the former. Then in 2001, a fortnightly magazine carried out a performance evaluation of some judges of the Delhi High Court, and published a Report Card, grading them on integrity and competence. The court saw red at this “scandalising”, and slammed a sentence for conviction. Of course, the court praised itself: the judiciary was the “messiah” which protected the press and media from state interference. Meanwhile, when it comes to allegations of personal misdemeanour and malfeasance by judges, nobody needs to even petition the court. It swoops down on its own and muzzles the press.
However, this imperiousness pales in comparison to the Delhi High Court’s award of a gag order in the case of Justice Swatanter Kumar, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, accused of sexually harassing one of his female interns. The 16 January order is nothing less than a generous reward to a SLAPP suit, and worse, it also reveals a manifest bias in favour of the plaintiff, almost as if there was a concerted effort to stifle accountability.
On 30 November 2013, a former intern filed a complaint of sexual harassment against the judge, and when the Supreme Court declined to intervene, on 10 January, she took recourse to a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) before the same court. Coming right on the heels of another similar case, it made to all the front pages and television channels. Though there were some headlines which could have been phrased better, not a single paper or channel even remotely speculated on the veracity of the allegations. All they did was quote from the complainant’s petition and disclose the name of the judge. On 14 January, a phalanx of legal eagles threw their lot in with the accused judge and made a beeline for the Delhi High Court. Their vociferous assertion was tha newspapers, television channels, and the intern had colluded to tarnish the reputation of an upright judge by leveling malicious and scurrilous charges.
Two questions hit us at this juncture. One: when the petition was pending before the Supreme Court, why would the plaintiffs rush to the Delhi High Court, unless of course, forum shopping was their objective ? Two: if their beef was with the allegedly defamatory reportage, why would they also sue the intern?
Parsing the order granting an interim injunction might hint at some answers. The issue before the court was a simple one – whether the defendant newspaper and television channels’ actions amounted to trial by media and resulted in adverse publicity against the accused judge. (Un)surpringly, Justice Manmohan Singh starts by praising the judge’s sterling record on the Bench, and arrogates to itself the right to decide whether there was a smidgen of truth in the allegations. He also holds forth on the need for a statute of limitations in cases of sexual harassment. Then he cites a Supreme Court judgement which had justified prior restraint on reportage and in one fell swoop imposes a blanket ban on reporting of the case. This ban’s scope is scary- besides media houses, “any other person, entity, in print or electronic media or via internet or otherwise” were also drawn in.
Effectively, it means that no one, not even a person or a blogger not connected with the case, could write, or even tweet anything about it. When in most jurisdictions bloggers are being granted the same protection as journalists, could there be a more regressive step?
Legally India, a web portal had used a heavily pixelated image of the judge, so as to eliminate any identifying marks and carried a report totally in accordance with the court’s injunction. Despite that, the fire-and-brimstone emails it received from the plaintiff’s solicitors leave no room for doubt- that intimidating into silence is the only objective. The plaintive plea about irreparable damage to reputation is only a chimera.
A free press is indispensable for speaking truth to power, even the vast powers of the judiciary. Moreover, the Constitution of India makes it incumbent upon the judiciary to protect the press so that accountability and rule of law do not remain mere shibboleths. And when this same august institution clearly appears to champions SLAPP suits, it is indeed a mockery of the rule of law, as a livid Editors Guild said without pulling any punches.
This article was published on 13 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
13 Feb 2014 | Academic Freedom, Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
(Image: University of Chicago)
This is not a ban; it is surrender. There is no nicer way to put it. Rather than fight the case in higher courts, instead of making the case of freedom of expression and academic freedom, and avoiding the option of standing by a renowned author, Penguin has decided to throw in the towel and agreed to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s award-winning, scholarly, entertaining, and authoritative book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, and to destroy remaining copies within six months.
Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and one of the foremost authorities on Hinduism. Penguin’s decision is unlikely to be based on literary merit — the book has been on sale in India since 2009 and those who wanted to, have already bought it. Now more will try to buy it through fair means or foul. And Penguin’s decision is possibly made out of expediency — perhaps to cut costs, perhaps to avoid trouble, or perhaps out of concern for the safety of its staff. None of this reflects well on Penguin or on India.
Dina Nath Batra of Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti had filed a suit in 2011, seeking the withdrawal of the book, saying the book was written with “a Christian missionary’s zeal” to denigrate Hinduism and show it in a poor light. For the record, Doniger is not a Christian, and even if she were that would be irrelevant — and yet in any case, Hindu nationalists have rarely let facts get in the way of their theories.
Also for the record, when the book came out in 2009, I had asked Doniger about the rise of the more militant brand of Hinduism, which has led to attacks on the works of overseas scholars, including Michael Witzel of Harvard, James Laine who wrote a book on Shivaji, and Paul Courtright who wrote one on Ganesha, and homegrown ones, like D.N. Jha, who wrote that Hindus do eat beef and there’s no religious stricture against it.
Doniger told me then that she had written her book to clear some misunderstandings about Hinduism, and “to counteract the Hindutva misinterpretations of the Ramayana”.
Last night I asked Doniger what she thought about her publisher’s decision. Deeply concerned, she told me: “Penguin has indeed given up the lawsuit, and will no longer publish the book. Of course, anyone with a computer can get the Kindle edition from Penguin, NY, and it’s probably cheaper, too. It is simply no longer possible to ban books in the age of the Internet. For that, and for all the people who have expressed outrage over this, I am deeply grateful.”
Read the rest of this article at Livemint
7 Feb 2014 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features
(Image: Shutterstock)
Lord Chief Justice Campbell, while introducing The Obscene Publications Act 1857, described pornography as “poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic” and insisted that the law was imperative to protect women, children and the feeble-minded.
The Indian Supreme Court’s observations and directions while hearing a petition in which online pornography is blamed for of the “epidemic” of rape and sexual violence is redolent of the pornophobia which had gripped the puritanical English legal system in the Victorian era. It is also a stark reminder of the befuddling and dangerous consequences of internet filters, as is being seen in the United Kingdom.
On 27 January, one of the defendants, the Internet Service Providers Association India (ISPAI) while stating that they would not indulge in voluntary censorship, posed a more challenging question — since there is no granular distinction to be made between “high art” and pornography, since temple sculptures can simultaneously be interpreted as both divine and obscene, how could they decide what to block and what to allow. On 28 January, all liberty-loving Indians were aghast at the Supreme Court’s intransigence on homosexual sex.
Taken together, these incidents portend to consequences more pernicious than just a chilling effect on free expression. As Lynda Nead contends, drawing a distinction between sublime and profane seeks to serve a social legitimising function which result in moral policing and violations of the rights of many.
Does pornography cause rape? Justice Douglas’ statement in Ginsberg — “Censors, of course, are propelled by their own neuroses” — and Ronald Dworkin’s reply to Katherine MacKinnon’s “breathtaking hyperbole” remain the most plausible answers to date, not a single study has been able to irrefutably prove correlation, let alone causation. However, Indian courts’ treatment of pornography has been ironic because exposure to obscene and sexually explicit material has been treated as a mitigating factor in rape sentencing. Reepik Ravinder and Phul Singh are two examples of rapists being regarded as victims of the “sex explosion” on celluloid. Not only that, a “ministry of psychic health and moral values” has also been directed to be established to nip this epidemic of vulgarity in the bud.
Justice Potter Stewart’s aphorism “I know it when I see it” holds true for any “definition” of pornography — even today. All we have got is a mystifying epithetic tautology — prurient, lewd, filthy, repulsive, which does no service to the clarity of judicial vision. It is easier to treat pornography as an accused, rather than an offence, because tropes and stereotypes make for poor and unjust legal definitions.
The plea to criminalise browser histories suffers from several grave elisions. For one, irrefutable evidence of correlation, let alone causation, between pornography and sexual violence or depravity is conspicuous by its absence. Though Delhi has a high rate of reported rapes, Google Trends data from 2013 shows more people in the apparently conservative bastions of Gujarat and West Bengal were searching for pornography online.
Most significantly, an obscurantist idyll defines the average consumer and purposes of online pornography. Evidence dispels the notion of only rapacious, lustful men devouring pornography. A 2008 survey reported one in five women watching and approving of porn. Forty-five percent of women who watched pornography also made their own porn videos, and stated how it had helped them being sexually inventive and more intimate with their partners. Another survey, deemed to be the most comprehensive, shows 60 percent women and 80 percent men admitting to accessing sexually explicit content online. Significantly, 30 percent of women respondents said that such content deals with sexual and reproductive health and romance, too. More significant is the response that usage of pornography improved couples’ sex lives.
Moreover, the upshots of dragnet internet filters are reasons for grave consternation. Google AdSense mistook an author’s memoir for pornography and blocked it. In reverse irony, smut sites got caught in an attempt to prevent bureaucrats from surfing sites related to the stock market. And since algorithms do not have a mind of their own, Christopher Hitchens’s polemic against Mother Teresa “The Missionary Position” might also lose its immunity.
India’s information technology law remains riddled with fuzzy definitions, and right now Google, stands indicted for defamation. A ban on internet pornography would further queer the pitch for intermediary liability, thereby delivering another blow to free speech.
Given the climate of legal homophobia, a reference to the aftermath of Canada’s ban on pornography becomes pertinent. There was a sustained persecution of bookstores stocking gay and lesbian literature, comics included, and 70 percent of prosecutions were of homosexual pornography. Besides, even if there were only opt-in filters, it would entail identifying one’s sexual preferences. And where demands for arresting homosexuals are raised on the flimsiest of pretexts, one would become a sitting duck for privacy breaches and criminal prosecution.
One can only wish these apprehensions, and not pornophobia, inform the Supreme Court’s decision.
This article was posted on February 7 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
