The official psychology behind the ban is frightening. To ban a few blogs, the government ended up denying access to millions of them. This was inevitable given the nature of the technology. But that was precisely what the government should have thought of — the rights of millions over the babble of a supposed lunatic fringe. The lunatic fringe has a right, too. If ‘Hindu’ bloggers and ‘Muslim’ bloggers are trashing each other, they should be able to unless there’s incontrovertible proof of their direct complicity in crime. That’s what — apologies for the cliche, but it is unavoidable — democracy is all about.

It is scary to think ministers and bureaucrats in the world’s largest democracy can so easily act like the apparatchiks of the world’s largest one-party dictatorship, China. The next time the communications minister, Dayanidhi Maran, under whose watch this gag order was executed, talks big about the internet and its potential, I hope blogs blister with sarcasm.

And I hope newspapers do, too. Because what is at stake here is fundamental for the old media. Blogging is editor-less self-expression, unregulated opinion venting, free form communication, it’s one guy saying what he wants and other guys sometimes reacting to what he says — it is chatter. And without the right to converse, there would have been no established big media. The right of the media to say what it wants is inseparable from the right of the people to say what they want. In which country do unfree people coexist with a free media? That should be the established media’s in-principle objection to the blog ban.

... contd.