[Reader-list] Anara - MMS - ITAct - Morality play comes to town

Fri Feb 18 00:30:56 IST 2005

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Morality play comes to town

Rakesh Shukla

THE continuing harassment of Anara Gupta even after the findings by the
Central Forensic Lab in Hyderabad nudges us to go beyond the limited issue
of whether she is the woman in the CD. The humiliation and stigmatisation of
the young woman seems to be looked upon as just and proper if, in fact, she
was the person in the CD.
Similarly, in the MMS case, the hue and cry over the working of the
Information Technology Act has been over the arrest of the CEO of the
portal, Avnish Bajaj. The culpability of the network service provider when
an act is done without his knowledge and after the exercise of due diligence
by him is the issue being hotly debated. The substantive offence under the
IT Act in the context of which the question of culpability arises seems to
have an across-the-board acceptance. The arrest of the boy and the IIT
graduate have been looked upon as just desserts for their actions, the
inevitable consequence of the working of the law.

However, a critical look at the substantive penal provisions in the context
of society today is in order. Section 67 of the IT Act, using 19th century
victorian English for 21st century cyberspace, declares that anyone who
publishes or transmits in electronic form any material which is "lascivious
or appeals to the prurient interest" or has an effect such as to "tend to
deprave and corrupt" shall be punished with five years imprisonment for the
first offence and ten years for subsequent ones. Section 80 gives power to
the police to enter any public place, search and arrest without warrant any
person suspected of committing or about to commit an offence under the Act.
The explanation to the section makes it clear that shops, hotels, cybercafes
fall within the ambit of "public space". The bizarre actions of the Aligarh
policemen after the MMS case - roughing up young people and pulling the hair
of girls in cyber cafes to make them face news channel cameras - have
demonstrated the hazards of conferring such a power.

Categories like ''lascivious'', ''prurient'' and ''deprave and corrupt the
young'' are taken straight from the Indian Penal Code enacted in 1860 and
reflect the conservative morality of that time. These are based on victorian
beliefs that "premature" interest in sex would impair the health and
maturation of the young and lead to insanity or stunted growth. Rather than
recognising the sexuality of the young and attempting to provide for it in a
caring and responsible fashion, the law reflects total denial.

Expressions used in the law are so vague and broad that a wide variety of
works from Saadat Hassan Manto to Arundhati Roy can fall within the ambit.
The victorian morality meshes with the conservatism of our own society. Till
today, there is strong opposition to sex education in schools. Even the few
schools which have sex education introduce it in inhibited fashion at a
stage by which time the children already know all about the birds and the
bees. It is secrecy and shadiness which imbue undesirable feelings of shame
and guilt around sex.

Given the materials on the Net and the CDs available from Palika Bazaar to
Bombay VT, the absurdity in prosecuting the MMS or Anara case is striking.
Given the daily news of child abuse, rape and molestation, stigmatising
young people engaging in consensual sex in the name of striking a blow for
morality strains the credulity.

In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the "Communication Decency Act".
The US Supreme Court in Reno versus American Civil Liberties Union in 1997
struck down the legislation and held that the Internet was a unique and
wholly new medium of worldwide communications with content as diverse as
human thought and was entitled to the highest protection. The court declared
that "interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society
outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship". It further
observed that protection of minors could be just as effectively achieved by
parents choosing filtering or blocking software and therefore government
interference was not constitutionally justified.

In the context of pornography and the depiction of sexual acts, sociologist
Gayle Rubin in Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of
Sexuality writes that "there is no evidence that readers of erotica commit a
disproportionate number of sex crimes compared to any other random social
group". Rubin argues that scapegoating pornography in fact blocks out an
understanding of structures which create sexism, aggression and violence in
society which would help in grappling with the roots of sex crimes.

The writer is an advocate, Supreme Court

URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=64691

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Expressindia | The Indian Express | The Financial Express | Screen
Kashmir Live | Loksatta | Lokprabha