Observations on India
India may not be terrific at football, but it knows how to score an own goal. Its bureaucrats have done just that, with such a clumsy attempt to censor the internet that a vast range of blogs got blocked off - including a hugely popular and valuable exchange site for information about the bombings in Mumbai on 11 July.
The government says that it instructed internet service providers (ISPs) to close down a few pages on a few sites that were insulting to Islam - something the law entitles it to do in the interests of religious harmony. But due to what one official called a "technological error", the ISPs went further and switched off Indian access to whole international blogging sites and services such as Blogspot and TypePad.
The result has been a dreadful mess, with countless bloggers and readers cut off from each other and India cast either as an enemy of free speech or as computer-illiterate. Worse, what the officials wanted in the first place was bizarre, since one of the targeted sites was in Mandarin, another was about boredom and a third didn't deal with India at all.
Inevitably internet users quickly worked out creative ways to reach the banned sites anyway (using, among other things, links with Pakistani bloggers) - a reminder that the smartest computer geeks tend to be working outside government.
Access to the sites and services is expected to be restored soon, but the damage to India's image may take a little longer to repair, as comparisons are now being made with China's draconian approach to the internet.
That is unfair: India's attempt at censorship has been noticed and fought vigorously by Indians in India, in a way that is impossible for Chinese internet users. China's internet censorship is also far more pervasive: it includes large-scale blocking of sites and jail terms for people who use the internet in ways that the Chinese government does not like. Almost all companies operating in Chinese cyberspace have kowtowed to the government.
Yet, even assuming that India eases the restriction, it has still been caught out making a bad mistake. For a start, India's political landscape includes many publications, public speeches and utterances, and public acts, by politicians and others, which are potentially more harmful to what the government calls India's national interests than blogs.
Not that banning them would make much sense either. And censoring blogs is pointless anyway. Not only is it technically problematic, as the geeks showed, but it may be counter-productive. Security-minded governments don't really need to fight blogs they don't like because other bloggers will do it for them, and it's surely worse if the ideas involved are kept secret. What's more, India has more important tasks at hand - such as figuring out who placed those bombs in Mumbai's trains.
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