Shameful

On the first day of Anna Hazare's Ramlila Maidan fast unto death against corruption, one of my colleagues got a call from a senior India Against Corruption (IAC) member. He wanted us to connect him across to a bulk SMS service provider. The reason was that their existing SMS provider had refused to send out those 8 lakh SMSes that ICA wanted to send out to people in and around Delhi to gather at the Ramlila Maidan. The reason given was that the telecom operator through whom they send out those SMSes had refused on the flimsy ground that the SMS content was objectionable.

When that specific operator was called up he said they had received calls from the police and the home ministry 'requesting' them not to send out these messages. Fortunately we knew a couple of more bulk SMS players and connected them to IAC. Initially all agreed to take up the job, but all of them quickly got back to IAC saying that their operator had refused. We were all aghast. Shameful is all that I will call this action of the operator. I do not want to talk about administrators and the policemen, but do our operators believe that if they do not send out those SMSes, people will not gather at Ramlila Maidan. Why are they so weak?

I was talking to a Human Rights Watch official visiting Delhi recently on why he wanted to meet up with ICT companies. He said that freedom of expression is one of the human rights and it includes right to information and facts, not just within a country, but across borders too. What was surprising was his observation that while new ICT technologies make information generation and dissemination much easier and faster, post the 9/11 tragedy, the Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib incident, and now the people's movements in some Arab countries, governments across the world are getting more fidgety and want to censor and monitor information in public domain. His India visit was aimed at talking to IT companies and telecom operators on what systems and processes should be in place to deal with such 'requests' from authorities.

In the Anna case, operational heads at these companies who succumbed to pressure and refused to send out Anna Hazare's message might not realize, but such actions will harm not only the society and the country, but businesses too. If big problems are hidden from people the problems will only worsen, and the solution that is worked out might be the wrong solution. Similarly, subscribers will never trust operators who block freedom of expression. If I have forwarded Anna's call to gather at Ramlila to 200 contacts on my phone, what is the guarantee that my operator will not share this information with authorities wanting to retaliate.

My simple recommendation on this is that operators, at the highest levels, must quickly get in touch with organizations that are working in this area of policies and processes regarding what is objectionable content, what can be shared with authorities and in what conditions. There are some very good international practices available, and we must have them. Otherwise, they will have to accept whatever the government tells them. If we can get the best and latest in technologies like 3G and 4G technologies, why not the best in these practices too.