India, the world’s largest democracy, prepares to kick off its election season in just a matter of weeks. But activists and experts worry that the government is cracking down on platforms and internet service providers to silence critical voices, and tighten its grip on the information ecosystem.
On January 16, Raqib Hameed Naik, an Indian journalist and founder of the website Hindutva Watch, received a notice from X, formerly Twitter, that the website’s account had been blocked, by order of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). “I received frantic messages from people in India saying they cannot access the Hindutva Watch Twitter,” says Naik
Hindutva Watch, along with its sister site, the India Hate Lab, tracks incidents of religiously motivated violence perpetrated by supporters of the country’s right-wing government, helmed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Press freedom declined under Modi, leaving fewer spaces for those reporting critically of the government and the impact of its policies on the country’s minorities. In the lead up to elections, where Naik predicts a “surge in hate crimes,” Hindutva Watch’s information may be more critical than ever.
No, the Indian government can’t do anything to a website that isn’t based in Indian territory.
A good example is a recent giant investigation by Reuters into an Indian hacker-for-hire company, and the man who founded (and made hundreds of millions of dollars off of) it. The man sued Reuters over it, and an Indian court found the article “indicative of defamation.” I believe Reuters is appealing, or there is something ongoing. In the meantime, they took the article down worldwide. Why? Because they have offices in India, and employees there, and the Indian government could punish those branches if the article stayed online in other parts of the world.
In this case, they’ve deployed similar tactics to pressure international companies to block the website.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker and The Daily Beast have large articles up based on the Reuters investigation, because they have no branches in India, and thus give no fucks about what their courts say. The original Reuters expose is also still available on the Internet archive.