Recent debates on Internet censorship in India have focused to the allegedly free-for-all nature of the internet. Those of us who have argued against internet censorship have been somewhat misrepresented as arguing for absolute freedom whereby the reasonable restrictions laid down in Article 19 (A) of the Constitution of India don’t apply. Nothing could be farther than the truth. It has been said that the internet can be used to incite...

I have not read the Private Member's Bill on media regulation that Meenakshi Natarajan was scheduled to move in Parliament last week so I am not in a position to comment upon it, but I am certainly of the opinion that the media (both print and electronic) needs to be regulated. Since my ideas on this issue have generated some controversy they need to be clarified. I want regulation of the...

The Supreme Court has taken steps to lay down a code for media reporting. This attempt at prior restraint on the media is a dangerous move with precedent from authoritarian polities. In a context where the judiciary has been lax in defending the media from attacks which seek to curb its freedom, such unilateral moves will not remedy bad reporting but rather make conditions worse for the media to play...

While freedom of speech and expression is an individual right, its actualisation often relies on a vast infrastructure of intermediaries. In the offline world, this includes newspapers, television channels, public auditoriums, etc. It is often assumed that the internet has created a more robust public sphere of speech by doing away with many structural barriers to free speech. But the fact of the matter is that even if the internet enables...

-BBC A young woman has had her child "marriage" legally annulled in northern Rajasthan state, in what is thought to be the first case of its kind in India. Laxmi Sargara, 18, wed Rakesh when she was just one and he was three. She grew up with her own family, only finding out she was married when her in-laws came to claim her this month. Child marriages are illegal in India but are still...