-Kafila.org When the Parliament’s budget session re-opens on April 24, the Rajya Sabha will vote on an annulment motion against the IT Rules promulgated in April 2011 that provide for “intermediaries” to remove the online content they are asked to by anyone. The motion has been moved by P Rajeeve, Rajya Sabha member from the Communist Party of India-Marxist. Speaking on the phone from Thrissur, Rajeeve said, “The IT Rules go against...

The fear that “anyone can be arrested any day” brought some 2,000 teachers from campuses across Calcutta out on the road on Wednesday to protest the arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, the Jadavpur University professor who had been put behind bars for forwarding an internet joke lampooning chief minister Mamata Banerjee. They walked from the central library of Jadavpur University to Triangular Park on Rashbehari Avenue. The rally, organised by the...

One tweet that had many cracking up was: “Dear Mamata, normally the cartoonist tries to capture the subject. Not vice versa.” The allegation was that Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra has used email id of his neighbour Subrata Sengupta (70) to forward an e-mail containing a graphic with a humorous reference to Mamata Banerjee for replacing Dinesh Trivedi with Mukul Roy as Railway Minister. The graphic uses photographs of the three Trinamool...

-The Telegraph   Bengal’s criminal investigation department (CID) has written to Facebook in its efforts to track down those responsible for uploading four internet pictures lampooning chief minister Mamata Banerjee. If the CID persists with the drive, it will mean that the government is keen to take its crackdown beyond the circulation of unpalatable digital content and to its very source of origin. The CID’s cyber crime cell had earlier written to Facebook and...

-The Business Standard Kolkata arrest shows the IT Act is too easily misused The recent arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, for emailing a comic strip lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, highlighted glaring flaws in the laws that made the arrest possible — the Information Technology (IT) Act, its amendments, and the Rules framed for its implementation. The strip was an innocuous mash-up that combined stock...