Backstory: The IT Rules Put âDemocraticâ India in the League of Dictatorial Regimes
A fortnightly column from The Wire s ombudsperson.
Illustration: The Wire
Media03/Jul/2021
As journalists appeared before the Loni Border Police Station (Uttar Pradeshâs Ghaziabad district) to make statements over whether or not they were guilty of a communally motivated crime by reporting/tweeting on that ugly assault on a 72-year-old Muslim, two aspects jumped out of the page for me.
First, the Ghaziabad Police themselves do not seem to have made any credible effort to establish whether this was a hate crime or not. As far as I know, we only have the statements of the miscreants that deny the charge. Two, and more important, the promises Union ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar made while introducing the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, in February this year â that the government welcomes criticism a