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BLOGS / Hate Speech - Abuse - Allegations - Invectives etc

POSTED BY Sundeep ON Aug 24, 2012 AT 23:13 IST , Edited At: Aug 24, 2012 23:13 IST

The PIB today put out a release under the title "Govt Not Targetting Individual Accounts or Websites; does not want Restrictions on Genuine users : Sibal" and provided the following comments attributed to Mr Kapil Sibal, the honourable minister for communication and information technology:

The difficulty is that twitter is a site, which operates from outside India and the server of all such sites are outside the jurisdiction of India.

We are happy that Facebook and Google are cooperating with us and the names of the objectionable sites that we had provided them; they cooperated with us on them and decided to close down those sites. We have also imposed restriction on those sites.

But as far as twitter is concerned, now they have said that they are ready for talks with us.

But the solution to this problem should be a permanent one. That will only happen when we talk to all the stakeholders and form such a mechanism under which any objectionable content is removed.

We can take action but in that case restrictions are also imposed on people who are right on their part. So, we don’t want that to happen.

So, we have provided 28 URL numbers under which objectionable material is being shown. Now the government does not know that who is behind these URL numbers, only twitter and other sites are aware about it.

Later if those URL numbers are innocent, and then the accusations would be thrown at the government.

Actually we don’t have the identities; we have no way to find out the identities. So, the accusations that we are aggressively targeting someone’s account or websites are incorrect.

***

A quick response:

Dear Mr Sibal,

Could you please help us understand the following:

So, we have provided 28 URL numbers under which objectionable material is being shown.

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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Aug 24, 2012 AT 23:13 IST, Edited At: Aug 24, 2012 23:13 IST

Google V/s Kapil Sibal

POSTED BY Sundeep ON Dec 07, 2011 AT 23:58 IST , Edited At: Dec 07, 2011 23:58 IST

Mr Kapil Sibal was quoted by the Hindu today as saying that "he had been left with no choice" because the internet companies "refused to delete incendiary hate-speech."

In response, Google pointed to its Transparency Report which effectively demolishes Mr Sibal's claims, as it points out that out of 358 items requested to be removed in the period Jan-June 2011, only 8 requests pertained to hate speech, while there were as many as 255 complaints against "Government criticism".

Google also told Medianama:

“We believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society. Google Search helps spread knowledge, enabling people to find out about almost anything by typing a few words into a computer. And services like YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view. Where content is illegal or breaks our terms of service we will continue to remove it.”

Mr Sibal's claims fail to stand up to scrutiny and are contradicted by another, yet unpublished, draft report by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) which shows that intermediaries are erring “on the side of caution” and "over-complying after complaints are filed" and that free speech on the Internet in India is already being curtailed in a “chilling” manner.

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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Dec 07, 2011 AT 23:58 IST, Edited At: Dec 07, 2011 23:58 IST

Is Banning The Answer To Inflammatory Words?

POSTED BY Buzz ON Aug 02, 2011 AT 23:59 IST , Edited At: Aug 02, 2011 23:59 IST

Timothy Timothy Garton Ash in the Telegraph:

...if it is ridiculous to suggest that there is no connection at all between Islamist ideology and Islamist terror, it is also ridiculous to suggest that were was no connection between the alarmist view of the Islamicization of Europe which these writers spread and what Breivik understood himself to be doing. “No ‘ideology’ here”? You bet there was. A significant part of Breivik’s manifesto is a restatement — often by internet copy-and-paste quotation — of precisely their horror story of Europe as ‘Eurabia’: so weakened by the poison of multiculturalism, and other leftist diseases, that it submits without a fight to a condition of dhimmitude under Muslim supremacy...

What, then, should be done about such inflammatory words? One answer, quite popular in parts of the European Left, is, “Ban them!”...

[But] this is quite the wrong way to go. It will not stop these thoughts, just drive them underground, where they fester and become more poisonous. It will chill legitimate debate about important issues: immigration, the nature of Islam, historical facts. It will bring to court fantasists like Samina Malik, a 23-year old shop assistant prosecuted in Britain for writing bad verse glorifying jihadi martyrdom and murder, but not the real men of violence.

Direct incitement to violence should everywhere and always be met with the full rigour of the law. The ideological texts that fed Breivik’s madness did not, so far as I can see, cross that line. Allowing the expression of the crusader fantasies of extreme Islamists and anti-Islamists alike is the price we pay for free speech in an open society.

Would you think that the advice is as relevant in l'affaire Subramanian Swamy?

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POSTED BY Buzz ON Aug 02, 2011 AT 23:59 IST, Edited At: Aug 02, 2011 23:59 IST

The Right To Write (And Offend)

POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jul 29, 2011 AT 23:40 IST , Edited At: Jul 29, 2011 23:40 IST

Now that the redoubtable Mr Digvijaya Singh has jumped into the fray ("It's a very bad article and it is seditious also") after the Harvard students who wanted that the university "end its association with religious extremist Subramanian Swamy" for his distasteful op-ed of July 16 in the DNA, it is perhaps time to compile our old short-takes and also revisit Salil Tripathi's article in the Mint on July 20:

If the secular, liberal, and leftist Indians want views like Swamy’s to be restricted, then the right-wing nationalists will want views like Arundhati Roy’s to be restricted. This is not to suggest that Roy and Swamy are in any way comparable, except to suggest that both arouse visceral responses of similar intensity among different types of Indians, and India is a better society if it aggressively protects free speech. Disagree with them by all means; challenge them, debate them. Don’t stop them from speaking. Otherwise, as the late Behram Contractor, who wrote as Busybee, astutely observed about the emergency, the only safe topics left to discuss will be cricket and mangoes.

As Sandip Roy points out in the Firstpost, more than anything else, hounding Mr Swamy out of Harvard would only make him a "freespeech martyr".

The Harvard petitioners had better be careful that they don’t make Swamy a political martyr in their zeal to kick him off campus without real debate. That would allow him the perfect excuse to retreat to the safety of yet more newspaper op-eds, where he can sit on a pedestal and lob incendiary monologues.

Let Subramanian Swamy defend his ideas instead, and the whiplash-inducing twists and turns in his ideology, in an open forum...

Swamy clearly does not believe in a pluralistic “open” society. But that is no reason for the rest of us to cede those values in the name of opposing him. To repeat what he once said about Saudi Arabia: “We are not going to imitate them. Our society is different.”

Harvard students should hoist Swamy on his own words. Instead of sending him into exile, they should remind of this inconvenient truth: There is no democracy without debate.

Meanwhile, Mr Swamy seems to be revelling in all the attention that he has never perhaps got before in his life, not even for all his 2G activism, or so it would seem at least going by his tweets of the past few days, where he can of course choose to be selective in what he responds to:

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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jul 29, 2011 AT 23:40 IST, Edited At: Jul 29, 2011 23:40 IST

Norway Terrorist And 'Hindu Nationalists'

POSTED BY Buzz ON Jul 25, 2011 AT 23:58 IST , Edited At: Jul 25, 2011 23:58 IST

Christian Science Monitor reports that the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik's 1518-page manifesto mentions that he acquired some 8,000 e-mail addresses of "cultural conservatives" not just across Europe but North America, Australia, South Africa, Armenia, Israel, and India – ensuring scrutiny of anti-Muslim groups far beyond Europe.

Noting that Breivik’s primary goal was to remove Muslims from Europe, the CSM points out that "his manifesto also invited the possibility for cooperation with Jewish groups in Israel, Buddhists in China, and Hindu nationalist groups in India to contain Islam":

"It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical," he wrote

According to the CSM, in his manifesto, Breivik references India dozens of times.

He included a five-page paper written by a man named Shrinandan Vyas that argues the Muslim invaders committed a “genocide” of Hindus in the Hindu Kush region of present-day Afghanistan. Efforts to track down Mr. Vyas have failed.

Read more at the Christian Science Monitor: Norway massacre: Breivik manifesto attempts to woo India's Hindu nationalists

Watch the Video: Knights Templar 2083

Read the Manifesto:

2083+ +a+European+Declaration+of+Independence

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POSTED BY Buzz ON Jul 25, 2011 AT 23:58 IST, Edited At: Jul 25, 2011 23:58 IST

Video: K.S. Sudarshan On Sonia Gandhi

POSTED BY Buzz ON Nov 12, 2010 AT 21:10 IST , Edited At: Nov 12, 2010 21:10 IST

The video of the controversial and wacko remarks by former RSS chief KS Sudarshan against Congress President Sonia Gandhi.

It should be noted that the BJP and the RSS have both dissociated themselves from Mr Sudarshan's bizarre remarks and the RSS has even "expressed regrets"

As a reader also pointed out in our rants and raves section, what Mr Sudarshan said now, bizarre as it was, has been said before and remains, for example, on Dr Subramanian Swamy's Janata Party website.

On Twitter, Dr Swamy had the following to say on the subject, pointing out that his charges pertained to the KGB, which, in Mr Sudarshan's version, had now become the CIA (read from bottom to top):

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POSTED BY Buzz ON Nov 12, 2010 AT 21:10 IST, Edited At: Nov 12, 2010 21:10 IST

Free Speech V/s Hate Speech

POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jun 21, 2010 AT 21:46 IST , Edited At: Jun 21, 2010 21:46 IST

In the NDTV show Walk the Talk in March 2009 Dr Zakir Naik was described as the “rockstar of tele-evangelism”:

“…but surprise of surprises, he is not preaching what you would expect tele-evangelists to preach. He is preaching Islam, modern Islam, and not just Islam but his own interpretation of all the faiths around the world.”

In February this year, the Indian Express, ranked him 89th on its list of the most powerful Indians in 2010, ahead of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen:

The evangelist, who wears suits and ties and preaches Islam in English, is a powerful orator. His sermons on Peace TV-English boast of a viewership of 100 million. The channel is aired in more than 125 countries and was launched in North America last year. Last year, he launched Peace TV Urdu, which has 50 million viewers. In the last 14 years, Naik has given 1,300 public talks, including 100 in 2009.

Power punch
Naik’s 10-day “peace conference” last November in Mumbai was attended by a million people. His lecture at the same conference was attended by around 2 lakh, including former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim.

What next
He plans to launch Peace TV-Bangla by December and a news channel by 2012 or 2013.

He then recently appeared in NDTV's We The People show as a participant in March, and while he was apparently unhappy with the reception he was given, many thought that he had been treated with excessive reverence. He expanded on his experience in these videos. In the words of one fan, "He cleared informed there were 75 DVDs released of top American analysts and professors who proved that 911 was inside job."

On Friday, Britain announced that it would not allow Dr Zakir Naik to enter Britain to deliver a series of lectures he was due to give in London and the city of Sheffield in northern England. Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May said in a statement, without elaborating:

“Numerous comments made by Dr. Naik are evidence to me of his unacceptable behaviour”

The following has been cited as one of those "numerous comments":

“Beware of Muslims saying Osama Bin Laden is right or wrong. I reject them … we don’t know.

“But if you ask my view, if given the truth, if he is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him. I don’t know what he’s doing. I’m not in touch with him. I don’t know him personally. I read the newspaper.

“If he is terrorising the terrorists, if he is terrorising America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, every Muslim should be a terrorist.”

Writing in the WSJ, Sadanand Dhume contrasts the way Zakir Naik is treated in India and points out that only a handful of journalists—among them Praveen Swami of the Hindu, and Khushwant Singh—have questioned Dr. Naik's views—and wonders whether it has something to do with how "India accords extra deference to allegedly holy men of all stripes". But he also notes:

...most of India's purportedly secular intelligentsia remains loath to criticize Islam, even in its most radical form, lest this be interpreted as sympathy for Hindu nationalism.

And goes on to argue, correctly of course:

Unless this changes, unless Indians find the ability to criticize a radical Islamic preacher such as Dr. Naik as robustly as they would his Hindu equivalent, the idea of Indian secularism will remain deeply flawed.

Mr Dhume's piece appeared on June 20 in which he also argued:

It helps that Indians appear to have trouble distinguishing between free speech and hate speech. In a Western democracy, demanding the murder of homosexuals and the second-class treatment of non-Muslims would likely attract public censure or a law suit. In India, it goes unchallenged as long as it has a religious imprimatur. However, create a book or a painting that ruffles religious sentiment, as the writer Taslima Nasreen and the painter M. F. Husain both discovered, and either the government or a mob of pious vigilantes will strive to muzzle you. [Read the full WSJ piece: The Trouble With Dr Zakir Naik]

But today's Indian Express carries an editorial which takes just the opposite view:

Words must be fought with words alone, not clumsy state action. Such provocation is inevitable in the complex, variegated democracies we live in — in both India and Britain, we could bump up against people whose positions worry us, and we are free to debate, mercilessly mock, or ignore that opinion. But to declare it unsayable is highly dangerous. Salman Rushdie, who has himself been singed by such logic, has warned Britain of the danger of walling off religious matters, saying that “the defence of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can’t stand.” Zakir Naik talks of ideas that some might abhor, but some others take all too seriously. Not permitting open discourse is to constrict the free play of disagreeement and disputation. [Read the Indian Express editorial: Talk is Cheap]

While words definitely need to be fought with words, and while sites like NewAgeIslam have been waging a heroic battle, and while even the likes of Darul Uloom Deoband and other mainstream Muslim bodies have spoken out and even issued fatwas against Naik, others argue that all of this is very miniscule and hardly effective given the large audience and viewership his TV channels command. Do you think there is a wide enough engagement or a platform to counter the reach of Dr Naik's Peace TV? How else should his words be engaged with? Do you think Britain did the right thing by denying him the visa? How should India and Indians tackle the challenege that Zakir Naik obviously poses?

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POSTED BY Sundeep ON Jun 21, 2010 AT 21:46 IST, Edited At: Jun 21, 2010 21:46 IST

Do Elections Bring Out The Worst In Politicians?

POSTED BY Sundeep ON Apr 14, 2009 AT 04:22 IST , Edited At: Apr 14, 2009 04:22 IST

Andre Béteille in the Telegraph:

It was not like that in 1951-52, at the time of the first general elections. What has happened between then and now is the steady advance of identity politics over all other kinds of politics in India. Nobody can seriously expect that identity politics will vanish from the Indian scene or even that appeals to the loyalties of caste and community at election time will come to an end. But as long as all issues are subordinated to the articulation of the grievances of particular caste and particular communities, albeit in the name of equity and justice, the electoral process will continue to move in the direction in which it was set off about twenty years ago.

More here

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