DEMOCRATIC India is considering monitoring FB, WhatsApp and Twitter to the point where you cannot delete anything you have received or sent for 90 days and it can be called for by the authorities and you can be questioned on its propriety without legal aid.
Anything so draconian must be a matter of great concern. Why the government would be interested in a conversation between lovers, friends, colleagues and the such is beyond comprehension. Millions of private messages of trivial consequence go out every day and they are not meant for official reading. A joke can become an indictment, a remark in jest can have you up the creek, a stupid ‘pass it on’ photograph can have you hauled up on a porn charge. if you delete something by error (do it all the time) it can be grounds for deep suspicion.
Are members of the public the enemy of the state? If this goes through and Oct. 16 is the deadline for opinions, there will be no such thing as privacy. Just by floating the concept even if it does not finally fly is enough to scare anyone. It is so intimidating when any piece of writing, however, innocuous, is open to official interpretation.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Guess who?
Gestapo.
Except, at least they knocked.
Here, they won’t even have to knock. They can just summon you for scurrilous writings if such an order gets passed.
Who can recall the context of a message written over two months ago? Imagine not being able to delete a message sent in September till December as your memory sizzles with overload.
What is the thinking behind this? I don’t know but it is a mystery how it would make for a safer, more secure nation if everyone is running scared and anything can be seen as offensive.
Will there be trip words, will the moral policing reach fever pitch and will this 90-day ‘hold’ be extended to TV and news websites so that if you speak or write something you can be vulnerable to legal action?
It is very early in the day to absorb the ramifications of such control but as we register the ripple effect Indians can only see it as a gag on free expression. Will there be a reckoning.
