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Mumbai, July 22: At the start of this year, I went travelling through Pakistan to cover India’s cricket tour for The Guardian. I was writing about the trip on my blog, India Uncut, as I travelled and met a number of Pakistani bloggers. One of them was an affable dentist, Dr Awab Alvi, whom I met in Karachi. Later, when I blogged about our meeting, I was roundly abused at some fora for making so many friends in Pakistan—‘‘that country.’’ I stayed in touch with Awab, of course. He is my friend, and his nationality mattered as little to me as mine did to him.
Last weekend, readers across India realised that they could not access any blogs hosted on Blogspot or Typepad domains. At first, some of us thought that it was just a regular outage, normal service would resume soon. But it soon transpired that the government had sent a list of sites to the country’s internet service providers (ISPs) with an order to block certain sites, and that these included blogs on Blogspot and Typepad. The ISPs over-reacted and blocked all blogs on those domains. There are at least 40,000 bloggers in India who use Blogspot alone, some of whom even make a fair bit of money from it.
Naturally, the blogosphere was outraged. The journalists among us whipped up support from mainstream publications and carried out our own investigations. International publications picked up the issue soon enough. Some people filed Right to Information (RTI) applications. The collective scrutiny made a difference and the government soon clarified that it had only asked for a handful of sites to be banned. And the ISPs said that they would soon return access to the rest.
There are two issues here that I could write about: the bumbling of the ISPs and the censorship by the government, and its lack of transparency and accountability. But both are being much written about these days, anyway. Instead, I will go back to Dr Alvi, and to Pakistan's bloggers.
A few months ago, Pakistan’s government had banned all Blogspot blogs. To get around it, they had created a website at pkblogs.com that used proxy servers to allow readers to access Blogspot blogs despite the ban. As soon as the blockage became known in India, I started circulating that URL to everyone I knew. Many other ways of bypassing the ban were also popularised, but this was probably the most common.
Then, one day, a bunch of us got an email on the mail group we’d formed to discuss this whole matter. It was from my friend, Awab. It turned out that the good doctor had been part of the group of Pakistani bloggers who’d conceptualised pkblogs.com, and that to show their solidarity, they had now another version of it at inblogs.net, sporting a nifty logo with an Indian flag on it. Awab also directed us to a javascript utility that, when downloaded, would allow us to access all Blogspot blogs without going to these sites.
So here were a bunch of bloggers fighting censorship helping out another bunch of bloggers fighting censorship, and sharing the same values: a respect for freedom of speech. It didn’t matter which country they were born in or what religion they belonged to, and so on. It was as if all bloggers shared a common nationality. And I really wouldn’t know what name to give that country, but I’ll say this much: I’m a happy citizen.
(The writer blogs at India Uncut, indiauncut.blogspot.com) |