This Article is From Aug 04, 2015

India Orders Blocking of 857 Pornography Websites Targeted by Activist

India Orders Blocking of 857 Pornography Websites Targeted by Activist

857 pronographic websites have been blocked by the government

New Delhi: Without warning or explanation, the Indian government this weekend ordered Internet service providers to block access to 857 pornography websites that had been singled out by an anti-pornography activist.

Within hours, social media platforms in India lit up with complaints from people trying to visit pornography sites only to find either a blank screen or a cryptic message saying the site had been blocked "per instructions" from India's Telecommunications Department.

Because the government made no official announcement about why it was censoring so many websites, much remained unclear Monday about its intentions, including how it chose which sites to block. According to Internet service providers in India, thousands of other pornography websites were unaffected by the order.

Adding to the confusion, the government acted just weeks after India's Supreme Court declined a request to block access to online pornography. In rejecting the request, India's chief justice, H.L. Dattu, said adults had a fundamental right to  watch pornography within the privacy of their own homes.

Kamlesh Vaswani, the lawyer who failed to persuade the Supreme Court to block online pornography, gave thanks Monday to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for taking a step that the Supreme Court would not. "Under Prime Minister Modi's good governance and the good faith with which this government has been working," Vaswani said in an interview, "they have been instrumental in blocking the 857 websites that I have been looking to get blocked."

After the Supreme Court rejected his petition, Vaswani gave his list of 857 websites to Pinky Anand, once a top lawyer for Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and now a top lawyer for Modi's government. It was Anand, he said, who delivered his list to the Telecommunications Department.

The government's action set off a furious debate. Some, arguing that the government has no business dictating what Indians watch online, accused the conservative Hindus who dominate India's government of imposing their morals on an entire nation. Others argued that the ubiquity of online pornography feeds an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness in ways that contribute to India's epidemic of sex crimes against women.
© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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