India darkens Dawn
The giant nation's online censorship of a Pakistani newspaper
highlights its disturbing hold on the Internet.
By Andrew Leonard
July 8, 1999 | The rest of the world hasn't been paying much
attention, but there's a war going on in Kashmir, where Pakistani and
Indian troops have been fighting, and dying, for the last two months.
And now, as with so many of today's bloody little skirmishes, there's
an Internet angle as well. It seems that India's largest Internet
service provider, the state-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (or VSNL),
has been blocking Web access to Pakistan's most respected
English-language newspaper, Dawn, for at least a week.
Net blockades are notoriously ineffective -- one Indian online service
has already posted detailed instructions advising readers how to get
around the restrictions. But this particular incident highlights some
interesting points.
The first is that all publicly accessible international gateways to
the Internet in India are controlled by one company, the state-owned
telecom monopoly VSNL. India may be the second-largest (in terms of
population) country in the world, and it may boast a thriving software
industry, but its interconnectivity with the rest of the world is
frighteningly restricted. Controlling these major chokepoints, VSNL
could easily censor India's access to the rest of the Net, as it
already has with Dawn.
The second point is more metaphysical. The roots of the current
flare-up in Kashmir trace back to a Pakistani incursion across the
so-called "Line of Control" -- the physical borderline that is
supposed to demarcate Pakistani-controlled Kashmir from
Indian-controlled Kashmir. Such borderlines are one of those messy old
nationalistic things that the growth of borderless cyberspace is
supposed to diminish in importance -- or at least that's long been a
cherished hope of Net libertarians. But right now, the Internet's
impact on the lives that are being lost in the harsh mountain terrain
of Kashmir is at best minimal -- and at worst, comical. India looks
stupid for trying to stop Indians from reading Pakistan's Dawn. But
it's even more absurd, in this day and age, to believe that the
Internet could do anything to resolve such a conflict.
salon.com | July 8, 1999
(Andrew Leonard is a senior correspondent for Salon Technology.)
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