[Reader-list] News Items posted on the net on Multipurpose National Identity Cards-104

[Taha Mehmood]

http://www.countercurrents.org/karun240309.htm


BJP’s IT Vision: The Discreet Charm Of
Techno-Hindutva

By Binu Karunakaran

24 March, 2009
Countercurrents.org

In June 2007 the Indian Express reported that the Shiv Sena (SS) is
planning to build a software to monitor abusive communities on the
popular social networking site Orkut. One doesn't know whether the
Shiv Sainiks made use of any web technology when they singled out and
slapped a criminal suit on a teenaged computer science student from
Kerala for letting anonymous users post defamatory comments against
Shiv Sena in a community he created in Orkut.

But one thing can be confirmed: The existance of saffron cyber
vigilantes crawling the internet for every bit of ideologically
inimical political kilobyte that lies buried in blog comments or
community discussion threads. Perfect virtual partners for the street
lumpens who beat up pub-going women or girls who dare talk to Muslim
boyfriends.

The crime of Ajith D who now faces charges of criminal intimidation
and hurting religious sentiments in a Mumbai court (his appeal for
quashing criminal complaint was dumped by the country's apex court).

There are several issues here that concerns not only the freedom of
speech but also the quality of democracy as reflected in our
participation in the information society through the medium of
Internet. The colour of content, the ideological orientation of
communities in the Indian cyber-landscape is showing a definite tilt
towards politics of Hindutva. Hundreds of ethnical and racially
abusive comments are posted in web discussion forums daily and any
content/article that touches Hindu nationalism brings in armies of
dogged cyber flame warriors.

The political activism of Shiv Sainiks in Orkut, which tops the list
of social networking sites in India with 12.8 million unique vistors
is only a pointer to a larger Hindutva project that aims to hijack the
cyberspace for its political ends.

In the past Shiv Sainiks have done everything from vandalising cyber
cafes to blocking entire web communities for hosting 'disparaging and
objectionable' content. But if you search for Shiv Sena in Orkut you
will find dozens of Shiv Sena communities along with anti-Shiv Sena
sites. Interestingly the ant-SS kept mostly alive by Hindu's who may
be supporters of BJP but can't stand the Maratha nationalism.

The Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been in Orkut since June 2005 and
currently has some 45,565 members. A well organised community which
also has the technical ability to provide members with SMS update. The
VHP at the time of writing this article had some 11,563 members. The
BJP supporters group also in Orkut has a strength of 21,023. The
National Development Front (NDF) currently known as the Popular Front
of India (PFI), a political party suspected of harbouring Islamist
agenda has 545 members.

For the comfort of the Left there's an unofficial CPI(M) community
with 619 members which suffers from lack of any active debate and
entry of fake profiles who carry out ideological sabotage. If you look
at Orkut communities little more closely you will find it a virtual
forest of fake profiles and pseudo communities. The profile of Praveen
Togadia for example lists Dawood Ibrahim as a community that he
joined.

The activism of Sangh Parivar's cyber sympathisers should be read
together with the massive online campaign that the BJP has unleashed
through the Advani cult website www.lkadvani.in and the www.bjp.org.
The newly released and much-hyped IT Vision Document of the party
establishes a broader theoretical framework for cyber politics.

It is easy to view the BJP's new IT vision document in the perspective
of techno-nationalism, where public policies that target strategic
industries (in this case the IT industry) are given governmental
support. The party's open support for Free and Open Software (FOSS)
and the promise to bring about standardisation in open source
computing has been generally welcomed by the Indian Freedom Software
community that prides itself on its stand against the greed of
techno-capitalism.

As a party with a prounounced techno-ideological goal of becoming the
most high-tech political outfit, the BJP is ensuring that its action
matches the words by moving its entire IT infrastructure into the
realm of Open Source - In the words of Prodyut Bora, the national
convenor of the BJP's Information Technology cell: to create an entire
enterprise IT ecosystem using only FOSS. So the party uses OpenVZ for
Server Virtualisation, Qmail and Squirrelmail for emails, Ubuntu
interface for desktops and Joomla for web content management.

The BJP is miles ahead of its political competitors when it comes to
thought and action on the possibilities of harnessing the
possibilities that the information society and the discreet charm of
the power that it provides.

To be fair on the BJP the IT Vision document is not short on
great/grandiose ideas (even if some of them looks recycled) that can
tranform our nation like a national digital highway, unrestricted
VoIP, a special rural IT infrastructure christened Digital Gram Sadak
and a programme to help the marginalised sections of people enjoy
fruits of IT-enabled development. Also clubbed together are
techno-nationalist concerns reflected in the promise to promote the
domestic IT hardware industry and the domestic hosting industry. The
party promises that it will make India equal to China in every IT
parameter in five years.Though one is not very clear whether the IT
parameter also includea the level of freedom that the country's cyber
dissidents and netizens are currently enjoying.

All this is well and good and reveals the Sangh Parivar’s bleeding
liberal info-tech heart.

But read it closer and you cannot but arch your eyebrows. The BJP
wants to set up an independent body - Digital Security Agency
exclusively for cyber warfare, cyber counter terrorism and the cyber
security of national digital assets. One can understand the cyber
counter-terrorism and cyber security part of the declaration. But what
is cyber warfare? Did they mean to say counter-cyber warfare and
suffered a Freudian keyboard slip? No sane country in the world is
likely to set up a body for Cyber Warfare - the unofficial stink job
of spy agencies and misguided techno-Jihadi's.

Then there is the new technology subdomain to bolster BJP's
ideological backbone of cultural nationalism. The use of IT to
protection of India's priceless cultural and artistic heritage. Good
so long as it is used to digitise ancient text archives, document
artforms and give fillip to dying languages. Scary when you think of
the potential to be used by self-imposed guardians of culture, muzzle
free press, gag bloggers and other cyber dissidents.

The pivot of this digital revolution will be a Multipurpose National
ID Card that will integrate all identities (Electoral ID, PAN and
Driving License) into one common identity: Citizen Identification
Card. The project which was the brain child of NDA's Obsessive
Compulsive Neurosis with our nationalistic identity and disregard for
citizen's privacy. The vision document claims that the project has
been dumped by the UPA government. But the claim is far from true. The
UPA set up the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) in
January this year.

The BJP now says it will combine the offices of the Registrar General
of the Census of India and that of the UIAI to create a Citizenship
Regulatory Authority of India (CRAI) which would maintain the National
Register of Citizenship. The CRAI would have a 24x7 Online presence
and enable government, law enforcement and ‘authorised’ private
institutions to let their computer systems 'look up' the MNIC database
in realtime. Leave the government institutions, but who is going to
‘authorise’ private institutions to run a check on our privacy?

"The amended Citizenship Act would make it mandatory under the law for
all citizens to acquire an MNIC and parents of newly born infants
would have to apply for one for their child, immediately after the
baby's birth," says the vision document. I hope there will be some
realistic time to cut the umbilical cord or tie a nappy.

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