Indian police get mobile over porn
By Siddharth Srivastava

NEW DELHI - While the police in United States and the United Kingdom keep a special lookout for men hauling rucksacks, in India, especially the metros, they have been peering into people's cell phones.

The long arm of the law silently watches over the shoulders of people to catch them "red-handed" watching porn, which is not illegal, but any form of promotion by forwarding/hosting (the technical word is multimedia messaging or MMS) can invite a jail sentence and a heavy fine.

Reports are trickling in from everywhere - outside discos, pubs, bus-stops, pavements, colleges. Some policemen have been brazen enough to catch anybody with a cell phone, which is quite easy as there are more than 50 million users in India, and ask to be shown all files, hidden or not, even though this might be beyond the law itself.

With other transgressions, such as jumping a red stop light or breaking the speed barrier, a little sweet-talking and a few dollars will see the transgressor go free.

But when it comes to an obsession that has gripped a huge number of mobile phone users in the county - to surf or download porn on the mobile phone - the police are going about their duties with exceptional zeal, and with an unaccustomed determination to view all of the "evidence".

The latest fillip to the phenomenon that has made the police hyperactive is to do with an actress called Mallika Sherawat. Western readers might be familiar with former Miss Universe Aishwarya Rai, India's export to the West who is known for her flawless virginal beauty, an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show and an extreme reluctance to kiss on screen.

Sherawat, though much younger in the movie industry, is also trying to make an impression in the West by starring in a Jackie Chan movie and making a bold (some thought she forgot to wear items in her dress) appearance at the Cannes film festival. Unlike Aishwarya, Sherawat is saucy, also very sexy and holds the Indian record for having kissed in a Hindi movie the maximum number of times. Thus, her fans are in the legions.

Some technology driven person who could be sitting anywhere in the world morphed Sherawat's picture onto a porn video, uploaded it into a cell phone and in a blink the MMS was everywhere. The upset actress, who was shooting somewhere abroad, called everyone she knew, including the press, her agents, officials, ministers, film producers and actors, which only heightened interest in the video. The morphed body has turned out to be that of a Mexican girl, while nobody can trace the originator.

To worsen matters, an intimate clip of two young upcoming Bollywood actors who were seeing each other until recently also surfaced around the same time as the Sherawat MMS. Some reports have blamed the jilted actor as the source, which only raises interest given the fascination for real action involving real stars.

Indeed, such has been the brouhaha that the beat constable, too, wants to take a peep in more ways than one. The police in India have been fighting a losing battle to check porn usage. They have raided the Internet cafes that dot the country and hauled up innocent young boys and girls and put them in jail. 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. According to Section 67 of the Indian Information Technology Act, transmission of obscene material through electronic media can invite a jail term of up to five years.

While the statute is quite clear, it is often impossible to exercise it as most of porn websites, including Indian-centric ones, are not hosted by servers based in India.

Beyond questions of law and morality, the mobile service providers are getting richer. In India, MMS messages are estimated to be less than 1% of the total number of text messages sent. But on days when there is talk is of a porn clip, on the sly, for real or morphed, traffic increases dramatically, and so do revenues.

Indeed, like computer viruses that cannot be checked, the market for MMS and porn CDs only seems to grow. For example, at Palika Bazaar in the heart of New Delhi, business is guarded but brisk, as there are more and more clips in circulation, often of unsuspecting couples. There are reports of employees having caught their colleagues in the act, a manager and his secretary purportedly from General Electric, bathroom and bedroom scenes, honeymooning couples, in the park, morphed videos next to India Gate, Taj Mahal ... .

While the Sherawat episode might have taken interest in downloading MMS porn on cell phones to new levels, the trend actually began last year. A schoolboy secretly filmed and then circulated a sexual act with his girlfriend using a camera cell phone after he broke up with her. The story (appropriately termed the MMS case) raised a furor and led to the arrest of the Indian country head of ebay.com, where a student of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology was peddling the clip.

It was also the country's first brush with reality sex on a cellular phone, which like reality TV always sells more. In the months that followed, there were several instances of intrusions of privacy courtesy of camera phones, involving celebrity couples, such as actors Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor. Some hotels in Mumbai and Delhi have banned camera phones in the swimming area.

Worldwide, camera cell phones are seen as tools that can invade an individual's privacy. In Japan and the US, public places such as bathhouses and swimming clubs have banned the use of camera cell phones inside their premises.

Maybe India will be next. Until then, the cops on the beat are going to fully occupied, or should that be pre-occupied.

Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.

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