Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...

-The Hindu “Take again Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code,” Jawaharlal Nehru said during a parliamentary debate centred around freedom of speech in 1951. “Now as far as I am concerned that particular Section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place…in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.” Ironically, the sedition clause not only remains on...

-The Hindu A key breakthrough emerging from a critical multi-stakeholder meeting held here on Tuesday on Internet Censorship and legitimate state restrictions during crisis situations was that the government should itself use the Internet and social media to counter hate speech with comfort speech. Hate speech on social media has been blamed for triggering riots in Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Mumbai two weeks ago. The participants, who included DoT Secretary R. Chandrashekhar,...

-The Hindu In an unprecedented move, the government, through the Department of Telecommunications and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, has agreed to initiate dialogue on Internet Censorship with mega Internet companies, social media giants such as Google and Facebook, members of civil society, technical community, media, ISPs and legal experts. The triggers for the discussion, which will be held on Wednesday, are the riots in Assam, Mumbai and Uttar Pradesh,...

-The Indian Express The exodus to the Northeast, perhaps the biggest mass displacement in peacetime, reads like the dark side of the Arab Spring or the reverse of a flash mob. The social and SMS media, which accumulate forces for positive change, were leveraged to spread rumours and disperse minorities by the fictitious threat of violence. And the response is totally inadequate. Social media shifted the balance of power from governments and...