Dear Kapil,

I heard that you recently called executives from companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook and asked them to set up a pre-screening mechanism to monitor user content on the internet. Pre-screen this: Fuck you.

Here’s the thing. Contrary to your belief Indians on the Internet have better things to do than sitting on our asses all day talking trash about the government. Sure there are some trolls, but then you have the National Advisory Council. But you know why we are mad? Because everything your government has gotten its hands on has turned into shit faster than Advani can install alloys on his rath. The thing with the Indian voter is that s/he is very tolerant. If each of you come out every six months and publicly slap yourself we will forgive you and let you continue the loot and plunder that you’ve been going about within your ministries while we enjoy that slap on loop on Youtube and making “Who slapped themselves the best” quizzes on Facebook. We can tolerate anything - the CWG, the 2G Scam, the farmer suicides, even your alliance partners treating the country like Shakti Kapoor; but with curbing our right to speech and expression on the internet you’re taking away the only thing we have left. The emergency was never lifted – it just got enshrined in our heads where we stopped ourselves from saying what we want before you even had a chance to lift a finger. Congratulations on successfully creating a system where one is considered a rebel for saying and doing things they’re constitutionally supposed to be fucking able to anyway.

You know why that fan fell on Sharad Pawar’s head? Because your government hit it with so much shit that it couldn’t take it anymore. You should know there’s a problem when your own fucking furniture starts rebelling against you. The Internet is not the Congress where everything needs to get approval from high command before it can be said. It has its own checks and balances – something you might not be able to comprehend with that miracle of technology you call the Akash tablet.  The mainstream media has already turned into Bella Swan, taking turns to fuck corporate advertisers and your Department of Audio Visual Publicity depending on its convenience, and now you’re taking away this too? How the fuck are you going to protect the country from external threats when you don’t even have the balls to face up to your own people? You might think your legalese will help smooth the issue over citizens, but all you’re doing is acting like an average Delhi thug who can’t stand it if someone says anything to hurt their ego and gets 10 people to beat the crap out of that person.  

Your arguments are the same. All of this will be in the name of “national security”, because our nation is so insecure that it can’t stand people having a contrarian opinion. Because despite having survived hundreds and hundreds of years through many invaders and dynasties it isn’t capable enough to handle a few haters who say things that piss you off. You’ll say this is to “prevent sentiments getting hurt”; which I think is high time you declare our national sport. I don’t buy the bullshit about India being the world’s largest democracy when the only options we have are a family that barely produced graduates, a party that tolerates genocidal maniacs and the communists who – well, fuck, I don’t want to say bad things about intellectually bankrupt poor people. I generally don’t expect much from you, but I didn’t think when you said you wanted to compete with China you meant copying their draconian internet regime wholesale. It’s not like there isn’t enough censorship by ISPs, technology giants and institutions like ICANN anyway that you want to create armies of unilateralist clowns whose only exposure to any issue will heed the line you want to follow. Says a lot about the country when a Harvard educated minister and an IIPM educated pseudo-intellectual management guru have the same opinion on a 21st century issue dictated purely by the politics of fear.

What you are sir are a bunch of pussies who pretend to be forward thinking but really are stuck in a bygone era where you’re probably still trying using Netscape to read this shitty blog post. If you think young people got pissed off with you about corruption – wait till you take away their porn and Facebook. More and more are waking up to your self-serving policy making - and my hope till then is that your government’s stellar record of being unable to execute anything except Rahul’s temporary encroachments over Dalit households extends to this regime.

In the meanwhile, might want to pre-screen for dementia. Happens with age.

Waiting for you to classify me as a foreign stooge as per your political playbook,

Khamba 

P.S: I wrote a paper comparing India's latest internet regulations vis a vis the United States and China. While the scope was limited, I think i'll upload it on Scribe. In the meanwhile I urge everyone to took at www.cis-india.org and www.medianama.com who have been working on this