The only way to fix the IT laws is to change the way they are made Laws in India relating to the internet are greatly flawed. The only way to fix them would be to fix the way they are made. The Cyber-Laws and E-Security Group in the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT, ‘DeitY’ according to their website) has proved incapable of making balanced, informed laws and policies. The...
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A beef affair with violence-Lakshmi Krupa
Meena Kandasamy, one of Chennai’s well-known activists and poets, was recently in Hyderabad delivering a few lectures at NALSAR and other institutions about Ambedkar, when she heard about a beef festival at Osmania University being organised by the Telengana Students’ Association and the Progressive Students Union. Several students and teachers had gathered to support the event organised by the dalit students and also as a symbol of admonishing cultural oppression from...
More »Caught in a net-P Rajeev
The new IT rules violate the right to freedom of speech and expression New media has come to play a major role in the process of opinion making, as was evident in the recent Arab uprisings and the campaign against corruption in India. It is a means of propaganda and a tool for mobilising the masses. The strength of new media lies in the opportunity for creative participation that it offers...
More »Capturing the cartoonist-Madabhushi Sridhar
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...
More »Toongate: Has Mamata Banerjee misused the IT Act?
-IANS Question: Why did Mamata Banerjee cross the road? Answer: To see if the chicken were making fun of her! In mid-April, the chief minister of West Bengal went viral with a vengeance. Hundreds of tweets (like the one above by @harqblack) carried the trendy #arrestmenow tag. Courting arrest got a new meaning. Now, Mamata is not the first to go viral. But such speed is usually found in other celebrity and entertainment domains. But...
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