Question: You receive the following image in a chain mail.
Do you:
A) Lament the despotic tendencies of Indian politics?
B) Chuckle with resignation and forward the mail to friends?
C) Brand the sender a Communist conspirator and initiate legal proceedings?
D) Find the person who forwarded you the mail and have him assaulted?
If your response was A or B – Congratulations. You are the average Indian internet user who understands that the internet is an open forum where users (including you) are free to express their views.
If your response was C or D, my commiserations. You have unwittingly stumbled on the internet and have mistaken it for an elaborate conspiracy where opinions are stated with the sole purpose of destroying the very fabric of the society our forefathers gave their lives to build. You must now embark on a vigilante quest for “justice”. After all, an opinion! How dare they?
Such was the case in April 2012 when Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor of Chemistry at Jadavpur University in West Bengal, unwittingly invited the ire of the ruling Trinamool Congrees and its cadre. The cause of their outrage? An email (given above) was forwarded to members of Mahapatra’s Housing Cooperative Society by Mahapatra which poked fun at Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee’s seemingly unilateral decision to oust Dinesh Trivedi from his post as railway minister and to replace him with Mukul Roy.
Mahapatra’s email, sent on March 23, 2012, was satirical in nature, spoofing Banerjee and Roy by drawing comparisons between them and certain characters from Satyajit Ray’s film, Sonar Kella.
The email was not his creation, but merely a pre-existing chain mail that he found amusing and hence forwarded (The nerve!). However, on April 3, 2012 he received a reply from one of the recipients saying that the mail was inappropriate and that it was wrong of him to have sent the email from the email id used by the secretary of the housing society. Mahapatra, however, states – “Since we used this email ID for services and announcement of events for entertainment value, it did not occur to me initially that sending a joke email would be found inappropriate”. He apologised unequivocally for this perceived transgression and believed that the matter had been laid to rest. But that would have been in a rational free thinking world. This, as we all know, is not such a world. This was Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal — a land where Communist conspiracies abound with the sort of frequency not seen since Cold War era America, and that dear reader, is where the plot thickens…
On April 12, 2012 while returning home from work, a small group of people accosted him. They forcibly took him to the Housing Cooperative Society office where he was then physically assaulted and forced to sign a “confession” stating that he had sent the email with negative motives and that he was an active member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He was also forced to tender his resignation from the board of the housing society. It was at this point that two police constables arrived on the scene, but instead of protecting Mahapatra, they arrested him and his neighbour at the behest of the group that assaulted him. Why? Because.
Mahapatra and his neighbour Sengupta were promptly arrested and taken to the police station despite the constables not having an arrest warrant for them. How? You disappoint me dear reader. I thought by now you would stop asking questions and just enjoy the surreal ride that is law and order in Banerjee’s Bengal.
On being taken to the police station, Mahapatra was charged with eve-teasing (Section 509 of IPC), defamation (Section 500 of IPC), humiliating a woman (Section 114 of IPC) and causing offence using a computer (66A [b] of the IT Act).
As news of his arrest spread, so too did the mail he had forwarded. Soon Twitter and facebook were abuzz with posts by Indians condemning what they saw to be an attack on freedom of speech and expression. Students and faculty at Jadavpur University where Mahapatra teaches apparently do not subscribe to Banerjee’s ethos and, thus, were outraged. Soon Taslima Nasreen and Pritish Nandy amongst others, also slammed Banerjee for her heavy handedness. The wave of public outrage resulted in Mahapatra’s release on bail the next day but only after he had spent almost an entire day in police custody. The four main perpetrators of the assault on him were summoned to the police station on April 14, 2012 and released within hours.
The West Bengal Human Rights Commission even took suo moto cognisance of the case, directing the West Bengal government to compensate each of the arrested with Rs 50,ooo as well as recommending departmental action be taking against the erring constables.
The government refused to backtrack on its actions, with Banerjee reverting to her go-to justification that it was all a CPI (M) conspiracy to destabilise the government and the “erring” constables no doubt breathed a sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that the right person had been elected.
Mahapatra, in a statement to Newslaundry said, “I was in complete shock. With my basic intelligence, knowledge and sensitivity to societal responsibility, rights and obligations I still cannot rationalise and comprehend the voracity of the charge made against me. I feel that it is grossly unfair”. The rational, free thinking world agrees.
On reflection, the hitherto over-zealous police, realising the absurdity of the charges dropped most of the charges against him. However, the charges they chose to persist with are sections 66A (b) & (c), once again highlighting the scope for misuse of section 66A of the IT Act 2000.
The wording of section 66A is so vague that only minimal misinterpretation is required for any communication to fall under its ambit.
Words such as “annoyance”, “inconvenience”, ‘obstruction’ or ‘insult’ are loose enough to brand nearly anything posted online as criminal. After all, a post on Creationism might annoy this writer, but I’m hardly going to launch criminal proceedings. I’m often insulted and annoyed at the barrage of quack penis enlargement pill adverts that clutter my inbox, but rather than getting in a litigious tizzy I just change my filter settings. And while traffic jams perennially cause annoyance and inconvenience the same feelings now justify criminal proceedings when experienced online.
This ridiculousness is the result of having laws governing the internet, a relatively new phenomenon, being drafted by an ageing parliament and upheld by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court recently refused to stay the implementation of the IT (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which require websites to take down objectionable material posted by third-party users within 36 hours of being notified of the need to do so. This puts the power to persecute firmly in the hands of the Executive and the over-zealous legion of police officers under their command.
Laws meant to uphold justice must be framed intelligently so that they uphold justice rather than become the mechanisms for miscarriages of the same. Keeping in mind the case of Ambikesh Mahapatra, it seems obvious that proper guidelines must be set to protect the freedom of expression of regular citizens rather than the interests and sentiments of the ruling classes. So while scam after scam sucks the country dry, me and you (yes you!) will continue sending mails and updating our facebook and Twitter in a cold sweat, knowing that every post may be our last, seeing as Section 66A is a cognisable offence under which no warrant or indeed common sense is required to arrest someone.
One would think after the egg on the West Bengal government’s face following Ambikesh Mahapatra’s arrest, this would be the last instance of misuse of Section 66A by the government. But I’d recommend, you think again.
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