The Wrong Way to Promote Tolerance

India

Saubhik Chakrabarti

The Indian Express

Indian newspapers should be ashamed of themselves, said Saubhik Chakrabarti in Delhi’s Indian Express. Very few of them have stood up for free speech by denouncing the Indian government’s draconian ban on blogs. In the wake of the deadly Bombay train bombings, the Communications Ministry wanted to block access to 17 blogs that it claimed spread religious hatred. When it found that it lacked the technology to block just a few sites on Blogger.com, it should have abandoned the attempt. Instead, it pulled the plug on the whole network, denying Indian Internet users access to literally millions of blogs. “It is scary to think ministers and bureaucrats in the world’s largest democracy can so easily act like the apparatchiks of the world’s largest one-party dictatorship, China.” It’s even scarier that, when they do so, the so-called mainstream media barely notices. “The right of the media to say what it wants is inseparable from the right of the people to say what they want.” Let’s hope we never have to lament: First, they came for the bloggers…

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