Curbing the free speech

When IT has made India one of the fastest emerging economy in world market, the regulatory move against virtually free online media including blog sites and other social networking sites is a clear indication of the fact that the rotten politicians and bureaucrats in this country are trying to tighten the noose against unbridled free speech, primarily because the ongoing exposures of their corrupt practices in unconventional media like Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, etc., have attracted huge public attentions and reactions, which become a deterrent to their clandestine corrupt practices. In the recent Anna Hazare's crusade against corruption, the social media played a significant role by spreading the awareness across the world, and this became another jasmine revolution.

Now that politicians think the educated, IT-savvy citizens are well-informed and their collective free speech can bring down their supremacy in a society that they have legitimately exploited for decades, which furthermore won't be possible and this fear psychosis has triggered an authoritarian regime like situation to nip any future online revolution in the bud. This is a serious contempt of freedom of speech provisioned in a democracy. No matter how blasphemous or hateful be the views on an individual on any subject, that should be given a benefit of doubts in the ambit of “personal interpretation”, not as interpreted by a motley group of “pseudo-intellectual bureaucrats” who have continuously blocked the social innovations in this country.

Every time when a corruption news breaks out in this country, people blindly blame politicians without analyzing the length and breadth of the crime, but the time has come now to look beyond the lopsided view. The systemic corruption in India is a phenomenon dangerously propagated by the bureaucrats since independence. Their feudal attitude to keep every policy inherently flawed has stumped the progress of this country. If we have witnessed any social, economic or technological revolution, be it market liberalization, IT revolution, or mobile revolution, in this country, that has been possible just because of the sincere efforts of some good politicians, technocrats, and intellectuals. Though there are very few bureaucrats who have helped executing the policies with due diligence, the majority of this power block have continuously manipulated the system on their side, and the recent move on curbing the free speech in a democratic system is again their misadventure to prohibit public reactions, but this act of despot will never succeed. Controlling the internet framework across the world by any local government agency has never been successful, and this wild act of authoritarian governance will rather raise more conflicts in a working democracy.