Times of India reports that Union Minister Kapil Sibal has been in talks with Internet social media companies to put in place a monitoring mechanism. On Monday (05 Dec), the telecom & IT minister met executives from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to discuss the issue.
The executives were shown content which could allegedly hurt religious sensibilities and obscene images of Indian political leaders.
But the reality seems that Kapil Sibal is more concerned about the negative image of his master(s) Sonia Gandhi & Rahul Gandhi.
The New York Times reported that about six weeks ago Sibal called legal representatives from the top internet service providers and Facebook into his office and showed them a Facebook page that maligned Congress president Sonia Gandhi. "This is unacceptable," he said, reported an executive.
How dare Sibal say that critisism of Sonia Gandhi is unacceptable? Is she above the law or does the Minister think that the law of freedom of expression in India is a slave to the whims & fancies of the Congress party?
Sibal wants the above companies to appoint people to screen content before it is uploaded, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted. THIS IS CENSORSHIP.
Assuming that Minister Sibal is acting on the instructions of his bosses to curtail our freedom of expression, let us respond by a scathing critisism against him & his party all over the internet.
The net cannot be controlled by politicians who want to censor the right to free speech just for their self-survival; and it is time this point was made clear to them in the most direct fashion.
