Tackling pornography

Visitors to adult sites may have had a shock over the weekend as the Indian government blocked around 800 pornographic Internet sites. Votaries of free speech are beginning to question the government’s moves. There is a seamlessly free world out there and there is no system that can clamp down on anything comprehensively on the web. And yet the government’s intentions are honourable. They are cracking down on what they see as an incipient social evil in a developing country whose youth is just beginning to enjoy total freedom of thought.

The Centre’s averment that blocking is only a prelude to putting in place a regulatory oversight mechanism on pornography sounds sincere enough. In effect, this is not censorship so much as trying to stem child pornography and other evils. In trying to get at the root of the problem, a country already scarred as the rape capital of the world is toying with the ideas of control of information, an attempt doomed to failure in this day and age.

Unfortunately, not even social psychologists can trace the problem to any one thing; they are divided on whether it is sexual liberation or centuries of sexual repression which is the cause. To preclude the viewing of pornography in public places like cyber cafes is a fair measure of control. But do the regulators really believe they can shut India out from the world? To educate emerging generations in modern liberalism is the route out, not censorship.