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India at war with Internet
porn
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - It is a sad commentary that
the Internet, the platform on which so much
business (including software) and communication is
being conducted with the rest of the world, has
turned into a dirty word in India. The country is
at war with Internet pornography, except that many
authorities do not know how to wage it.
In
Uttar Pradesh, the state police have been raiding
Internet cafes, hauling up young boys and girls
and throwing them in jail. The police hold that
the small cubicles at the cafes, with lock-in
facilities, are being used by boys and girls to
indulge in sexual acts and access pornographic
material. Such raids have been happening across
India's biggest state, in the capital Lucknow, in
Agra (the city of the Taj Mahal), as well as in
smaller towns such as Etawah. This is not to deny
that cyber-cafes are not being used for such
practices, but it is the brazenness of the police
that has come in for criticism.
Predictably, there are innocents who are
also caught, with one girl saying that she was
surfing for information about admissions to a
university when the police arrested her. "They
don't have any idea about the Internet," she said.
"They don't know that it can be put to such useful
purposes." Another girl said: "I was typing my
resume, which I had to submit to my school, when a
policeman walked in and said I was watching porn.
They called up the media, who clicked our photos
as if we were criminals. No policeman listened to
our pleas."
Unlike in the cities, computer
penetration in Indian towns is less than 12%,
because of which cyber-cafes have done brisk
business over the past few years and are far more
popular than they are in the West, where people
generally prefer to surf from the comfort of their
homes or offices. A senior police officer who led
the raids has been quoted as saying: "Besides
watching porn websites, couples also had sex
inside the small cabins of these cafes. The cabins
have high walls and can be bolted from inside.
Also, the entire first floor of these cafes was
only meant for couples, with single girls or boys
not allowed there. We found condoms strewn all
over an empty plot [of land] near the cafes."
Viewing pornography in the privacy of
one's home doesn't come under the ambit of the
law, but to do so in a cafe, which is legally
defined as "public space", is illegal. Using the
same clause of public indecency, the police as
well as politicians (heading what are known as
"culture brigades") in the past have swooped down
on couples in parks, buses, trains and movie
halls, more with the intention of harassing to
make a fast buck or gain political mileage, rather
than over any fault of the boy and girl, who in
many cases may not be doing any of the stuff they
are hauled up for. The Internet has opened a new
vista. Indeed, India is at a crossroads on how to
handle porn uploaded on servers located anywhere
in the world that can be accessed by young,
impressionable minds. The police in Uttar Pradesh
are just one brutal ramification of an issue that
requires more sensitive handling and which many
parents are deeply worried about.
In
keeping with the fear of technology polluting
young minds, this week the Delhi government banned
mobile phones from all schools run and aided by it
and advised private schools to follow the example.
This was in response to the case of the widely
circulated sexually explicit video clip of two
students of a prominent private school shot on a
mobile phone. The MMS case (referring to
multimedia messaging service, the mobile
technology used to transmit the clip) was being
auctioned on popular website eBay-baazee.com and
recording brisk sales. A country head of the
website and a student of the prestigious Indian
Institute of Technology who had posted the clip
for sale on the site had been arrested in this
connection. According to Section 67 of the
Information Technology Act, transmission of
obscene material through electronic media can
invite a jail term of up to five years, though the
arrest of the India head of eBay has been compared
to jailing the minister (rail, for instance) for
an accident that can happen anywhere in the
country (see India's
porn police bring their quarry to eBay,
December 22, '04).
In the state of
Maharashtra a special committee set up by the
Mumbai High Court has recommended that it should
be made obligatory for proprietors of cyber-cafes
to protect young people and minors from
"unsuitable Internet material" and cyber-stalkers,
with several cases of pedophilia having been
reported in Mumbai, the state capital. The
committee wants a mandatory record of
photo-identity cards, personal details, logs of
all the sites the users have visited, and wants to
restrict minors to machines that do not have
cubicles. "This will prevent easy access of
pornography to minors and help police trace those
who e-mail inappropriate material to minors from
cafes," said one committee member, Gautam Patel.
It is believed that once this statute is in place,
other states are likely to follow.
The
recommendation has angered many cafe owners, who
say the diktat would be expensive to
implement and detrimental to business. One cafe
owner in an upscale area in Mumbai said, "about
50% of my customers come to access pornography."
Another said: "Visiting a cafe is an impulsive
decision. What if you don't have an identity card
on you? I lose a customer? And maintaining IP
[Internet protocol] logs is a drain on my
resources. I have to invest a lot of time, or buy
software that will do the job. Keeping track of
the sites a user has visited is the same as
monitoring his activities, which will put him off.
Also, I have to invest in tearing off the cubicles
to accommodate special seats for minors. The whole
thing is very unfair."
According to
cyber-law expert Pawan Duggal, the Information
Technology Act 2000 lacks the necessary teeth to
deal with the growing number of cyber-crimes. "I
believe that 2005 is going to be the year of
broadband in India. We will see a rise in
broadband services and connectivity, just like the
cable-TV industry boomed in the earlier '90s,"
Duggal said. "However, there might be some major
legal challenges in this area too," he added. "The
law needs to specify and amend its position on
liability and culpability issues relating to
content, violation of intellectual property
rights, etc, in the converged broadband
environment."
The Indian government has
set up a panel to review the IT Act and also study
the culpability of cyber-cafes in allowing access
to pornography, as well as the liability on a
website for promoting such material. The panel
will also study appropriate legislation for data
protection and privacy to protect the country's
software and data-processing industry, and
provisions to enhance information and
communication technology, e-commerce and
e-governance, and regulate cyber-crimes and
forensics.
Until the new framework is in
place, nobody can justify masses of young people
being bundled into cramped police stations for
surfing the 'Net, even if there are some who
indulge in other stuff.
Siddharth
Srivastava is a New Delhi-based
journalist.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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