Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (48 page)

On any given day, people are sending 150 million Twitter messages, nearly a billion tweets every week. There are two ways to look at this: that it’s symptomatic of information overload, or that it represents a huge audience of information generators and consumers that people in positions of public responsibility ignore at their peril. My own sympathies are very much towards the latter view.

The world is full of examples of what Gowing calls ‘non-professional information doers’: hundreds of millions of amateurs with an electronic eye who can now be found anywhere. As many as 4 billion people worldwide—including 84 per cent of Americans, more than 65 per cent of Chinese and perhaps 60 per cent of all Indians today—now use mobile phones worldwide. They all get messages out. And they do so more rapidly than the official mechanisms can. Their strength is that they enable people to issue and disseminate material, including raw footage and compellingly authentic images, before the mainstream media, or for that matter governments, can do so. Inevitably, this means they shed light where officialdom would prefer darkness, as China learned when video footage of a shootout involving Uighur separatists in 2008 made it to the world media despite Beijing’s denials.

The core implications are striking. We have all heard about the so-called 24/7 news and information cycle, but with social media the pressure of the news cycle can build up not just over a few hours but often in no more than a few minutes. As images, facts and allegations emanating from cellphones and digital cameras go viral, they undermine and discredit official versions, present an alternative reality in the face of government denials and, fuelled by dissenters and expatriates, rebound on to the evolution of the situation itself. Twitter and digital cameras had a huge impact on the Iranian protests after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Despite Tehran’s attempts to manage the crisis, social media kept the protests alive for far longer, and with more prolonged intensity, than they could have survived without that digital fuel.

With such instant scrutiny, governmental power is rendered more vulnerable. In the old days, governments assumed they could command the information high ground in a crisis. That is simply no longer true.

It is fair to say that India has been slow to recognize the potential of social media in dealing with its own domestic challenges and opportunities. But the case for social media has been gaining ground. We are already one of the world’s leading countries in the use of Twitter, and social media is bound to gain as the prospects for e-government improve by the day. Indeed, the first draft of the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011, has proposed that all ministries and government departments will have to deliver services electronically, whether through the Internet
or mobile phones. So India is not just on the right track, but bids fair to become a model of e-governance in the developing world.

And yet the recent controversy over the government’s alleged desire to censor Facebook, Twitter and other leading lights of the social media has obscured our progress in this area and also raised some genuine and urgent questions we need to address about free speech in our society—not to mention dented India’s image as a bastion of freedom abroad, and so undermined our soft power in the eyes of the Internet community.

The problem arose when the
New York Times
reported that our telecom minister, Kapil Sibal, had called in senior social media executives from Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and allegedly asked them to prescreen disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory user content from India ‘and to remove it before it goes online’. Such a request inevitably sparked off a firestorm of Internet protest against the minister, without waiting to hear his side of the story. Facebook pages sprang up to denounce him; web-boards overflowed with nasty comments against the minister, the ruling party and the government, suggesting they were trying to protect a political leader; and the hashtag ‘#IdiotKapilSibal’ started ‘trending’ on Twitter. All a bit over the top, a reflection of the gradual coarsening of public discourse thanks to the anonymity that the Internet provides (the very anonymity that protects activism in repressive dictatorships allows irresponsibility to thrive in democracies).

As a frequent recipient of ‘disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content’ myself, I’m no great fan of unpleasantness on any media, social or otherwise, but I’m strongly opposed to censorship. Freedom of speech is fundamental to any democracy, and many of the most valuable developments in India would not have been possible without it. Freedom of speech is the mortar that binds the bricks of our democracy together, and it’s also the open window embedded in those bricks. Free speech keeps our government accountable, and helps political leaders know what people are thinking. Censorship is a disservice to both rulers and ruled.

But—and free speech advocates hate that ‘but’!—every society recognizes some sensible restraints on how free speech is exercised. Those restraints almost always relate to the collectivity; they arise when the freedom of the individual to say what he wants causes more harm to more people in society than restricting his freedom would. Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the United States, put it memorably when he said that freedom of speech does not extend to the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. (After all, that could cause a stampede, in which people could get trampled upon, injured and even killed, and the theatre’s property destroyed—all consequences that outweigh the individual’s right to say what he likes.)

Since societies vary in their cultural and political traditions, the boundaries vary from place to place. Free speech absolutists tend to say that freedom is a universal right that must not be abridged in the name of culture. But in practice such abridgement often takes place, if not by law then by convention. No American editor would allow the ‘n’ word to be used to describe Black Americans, not because it’s against the law, but because it would cause such offence as to be unacceptable to use. Just as the commonplace practice of women taking off their bikini tops at St Tropez, Copacabana or Bondi Beach could not be replicated on the beaches of Goa, Dubai or Karachi without risking assault or arrest, so also things might be said in the former set of places that would not pass muster in the latter. It’s no use pretending such differences (of culture, politics and sensitivity) don’t exist. They do, and they’re the reason why free speech in, say, Sweden isn’t the same as free speech in Singapore, or even in Surat.

The problem is particularly acute on social media, because it’s a public forum for the expression of private thoughts. The fact is that social media’s biggest asset is also its biggest problem. Its strength is that social media enables ordinary people (not just trained journalists) to ‘report’ news and opinions before any other source, including governments or traditional media, can do so. Even more, any individual with the basic literacy needed to operate a keyboard can express his or her opinion, create information, whether video or text, and communicate it immediately, without the delays necessarily wrought by editorial controls, cross-checking or even the synthesizing that occurs in a ‘mainstream’ media newsroom.

That gives social media an advantage over regular media as a disseminator of public opinion. If you wanted to express your views in, say, a newspaper, you would have to write something well enough to pass editorial muster; your facts and opinions would be checked, vetted and challenged; your prose might be cut for space reasons (or mere editorial whim); and you might have to wait days, if not weeks, to see your words
in print. None of that applies to social media. You can write all you want, as you want, in the words you want, on a blog or a Facebook page, put it up with a Twitter link, click a mouse and instantly watch it all go viral. It’s a twenty-first-century freedom that no democratic political leader would wish to confront.

And yet this very freedom is its own biggest threat. It means anyone can say literally anything, and inevitably, many do. Lies, distortions and calumny go into cyberspace unchallenged; hatred, pornography and slander are routinely aired. There is no fact-checking, no institutional reputation for reliability to defend. The anonymity permitted by social media encourages even more irresponsibility: people hidden behind pseudonyms feel free to hurl abuses they would never dare to utter to the recipients’ faces. The borderline between legitimate creative expression and ‘disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content’ becomes more difficult to draw.

Minister Sibal’s main concern, as he explained it to me, was not with politics, but with scurrilous material about certain religions that could have incited retaliatory violence by their adherents. People say or depict things on social media that might be bad enough in their living rooms, but are positively dangerous in a public space. The challenge of regulating social media is that the person writing or drawing such things does so in the privacy of his home but releases them into the global commons. My own yardstick is very clear: I reject censorship. Art, literature and political opinion are to me sacrosanct. But publishing or circulating inflammatory material to incite communal feelings is akin to dropping a lighted match at a petrol pump. No society can afford to tolerate it, and no responsible government of India would allow it. Personally, I’d rather stub out that match than close down the petrol pump.

But I’m far from sure that prosecuting Facebook or Google is the right way to go about it. After all, could you sue the phone companies for someone sending a defamatory or obscene SMS? The analogy to a newspaper is wrong—these social network sites are more like the postman carrying the newspaper to your door. You would prosecute the newspaper for publishing legally actionable material, but you would not prosecute the postal service. Our learned judges are now examining the matter but I hope they will take into account these realities of the Internet era. In the meantime, there is an urgent need for senior government officials to
recognize the realities of the Internet age and the huge damage that can be done to India’s soft power if, as a judge fatuously and irresponsibly remarked, India chooses to go the way of China.

I suppose I was the first government official in India who engaged with the general public online on Twitter, though in all fairness, BJP leader L.K. Advani’s web page had already created a lot of buzz during the last elections. More and more politicians are online today, including Sushma Swaraj and Narendra Modi of the BJP, and Digvijay Singh, Anil Shastri, Naveen Jindal, Manish Tewari and Hamdullah Sayeed of the Congress, with politicians issuing their own bulletins and actually answering individual questions online. Sometimes this creates its own challenges: Sushma Swaraj has already blamed Twitter’s 140-character limit for an imprecisely worded message about the prime minister that created political ripples within the BJP. Of course, there is the safety net that politicians can always type, delete and retype before pressing enter—but Ms Swaraj, by her own admission, dictates her Twitter messages, so perhaps that is more difficult for her.

Bureaucrats are following suit, with the best-known example probably being former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, who opened and operated a Twitter account while still in office (a practice her successor has, alas, abandoned). She in turn may well have been inspired by the success of the MEA’s public diplomacy division, whose officials, led by Navdeep Suri and with my active encouragement, have set up a Twitter page and have been pursuing social media strategies, including a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, to let people know about what the ministry and diplomatic missions do. This has enabled them to promote India’s soft power (even within the country) by creating goodwill among social media users, whether in India or abroad. To me the MEA’s initiative was excellent: it puts India on a par with the Western democracies which have already adopted social media sites as an instrument of outreach.

Of course, India must examine the advantages—and possible pitfalls—of using social media as a tool for diplomacy. The advantages are clear. India acquires a new, young, literate and global audience for our foreign
policy initiatives and positions. By being accessible to Internet searchers, we earn goodwill. By providing accurate and timely information, we eliminate the risks of misrepresentation or distortion of our position.

The pitfalls of using social media are the ever-present risk that something said on a social network could itself be taken out of context or misused by our critics. Responses to questions are particularly vulnerable to being issued in haste and without the usual careful vetting that more formal statements undergo. The nature of the medium calls for speedy issuance of information and instant reaction, neither of which government processes are designed for. India was excoriated on the Internet for having failed to issue a reaction to bomb blasts in Mumbai’s Jhaveri Bazaar in 2011 before the Pakistani foreign office did so, even though the tragedy had taken place on Indian soil. MEA officials were, however, unrepentant, pointing out that it is precisely because the events took place in India that New Delhi had a greater responsibility to measure its words.