Palash Krishna Mehrotra on muzzling the social media

This bizarre law can put you behind bars for up to three years for sending emails or posting on Facebook or tweeting anything that causes "annoyance or inconvenience."

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Palash Krishna Mehrotra on muzzling the social media

In the wake of the murder of Pune techie, Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh, Maharashtra home minister RR Patil said the police will now book even those who endorse 'objectionable' content by clicking on the 'like' button or by retweeting. Those forwarding such content would be booked as co-accused.

The police can make arrests under the vaguely drafted Section 66(A) of the IT Act. This bizarre law can put you behind bars for up to three years for sending emails or posting on Facebook or tweeting anything that causes "annoyance or inconvenience." Not surprisingly, the law has become a weapon in the hands of the state to stifle dissenting voices. It has been used by state governments cutting across party lines.

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The police works at great speed, picking up people in midnight raids and pre-dawn swoops, as if they were hunting down dangerous criminals. Except these people are not criminals, but college students, schoolteachers and senior citizens expressing their views in a public forum. In West Bengal, Section 66(A) was used against a professor and his neighbour, a man in his seventies, for emailing cartoons making fun of the CM. They were arrested at midnight and kept in 'protective custody' for days. Author Amaresh Mishra was arrested from his Gurgaon residence for posting comments critical of Modi.

Censorship

It all began in back in 2012, when Ravi Srinivasan, a middle-aged businessman based in Pondicherry, posted a tweet (to 16 followers) that said Karti Chidambaram, son of the then finance minister, had "amassed more wealth than Vadra." He has the dubious distinction of being the first person to be arrested under the new law. The police acted swiftly on a complaint filed by Chidambaram.

They were at Srinivasan's doorstep early in the morning.

In a well-publicised case, Shaheen Dhada, a 21-year-old girl was arrested in Thane for questioning the total shutdown of Mumbai in the aftermath of Bal Thackeray's death.All she did was to express a personal opinion, shared by several others, especially those who were inconvenienced by the lack of public transport on the day. Another girl who 'liked' the comment was also arrested. Miscreants attacked her uncle's nursing home, causing damages of Rs 2 lakh. The state failed to protect a citizen's private property.

It's not just prickly politicians and their supporters who have been misusing Section 66 (A). In an absurd case, the Chandigarh police charged 22-year-old Henna Bakshi under the same Section. Her SUV had been stolen a month earlier but the police still hadn't registered a complaint.Henna's crime was that she wrote a sharply-worded complaint on the Chandigarh police's FB page. That's all it took. It is shameful that this string of crackdowns on freedom of speech is happening in a liberal democracy like ours. The state, instead of criminalizing its citizens, should be protecting their civil liberties. There are several problems with Section 66 (A).One, it's completely arbitrary. Shaheen Dhada's views were shared by thousands of others who were saying the same things on FB, Twitter and in person to one another. So why arrest only her? Two, the law has never been used against politicians. It seems that they have an exclusive right to make hate speeches and indulge in mud-slinging vis-a-vis each other. It's only the citizen who is punished.

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Subramanian Swamy too made allegations of corruption against Karti Chidambaram but no charges were pressed. Thackeray himself was known to make inflammatory speeches against regions and communities, but was never arrested.

Whims

Three, the law in question needs to be worded with clarity.British lawmakers in colonial times took some care to spell out what words like 'offensive' meant. Here it has been left to the whims of local authorities and how they choose to interpret it.

Let me conclude with some thoughts on the changing nature of social media. In the early days, sites like FB offered people a kind of backstage, informal space. Users went public with opinions on this and that, as also intimate details of their lives. FB was a space where one could be naturally spontaneous. It was innocent, uninhibited and uncensored.

Deviance

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That is no longer the case. People now doctor FB accounts because your boss and the HR guy in office might be searching your page for 'deviant' behaviour. FB it seems gives employers some kind of 'real insight' into your personality. The employee then self-censors and projects a desired image. Politicians and celebrities use bots to appear more popular than they really are. Bots are lines of code that are built to behave like people on social media sites. You can buy bots for a fee and they will push up the number of retweets, likes, and page views.

When the police and politicians are not harassing people for opinions expressed on FB, fellow citizens are. RN Joe D'Cruz, who is known as the 'Hemingway' of contemporary Tamil literature, wrote a post on his wall calling Modi a 'dynamic visionary'. His publisher, Navayana then cancelled their agreement to translate his book. According to the publisher, Modi is a "fascist."

Clearly, expressing an opinion on social media is a fraught business these days. You can lose a job, lose a publisher, go to jail. We used to be taught to keep our mouths shut, now it's about keeping our fingers in check. At this rate, finger-muzzles might become the newest rage.

The writer is author of The Butterfly Generation