but oh look muslim group SIMI decides not to be so intellectually challenged and decided to get with the times and BLOG their woes away.

idiots.

anyway what was the govt thinking!?! oh thats right they weren’t. they prolly got too high on the national security drug and then when the high wore off (which happened when the pakis brought abt pkblogs) they said OH lets jus give those ppl their blogs back.

what will they think of next i wonder… ‘ban on ice cream! we want those SIMIs to wilt in the heat!! muhhaha…’

idiots.

…

“there obviously are more good than bad in the govt, which is why we have gotten to where we are. if the opposite were true, the ban on some & temporary outage should be the last worries.”

Very true – which is why I spend 15 minutes a day in discussion on this blog, and several hours daily drafting responses to daft draft proposals by the government. Trust me pal, if you hear some of the stories of how some laws and rules are passed, you’d feel pretty sad about GOI.

But then, this is GB’s blog, and we’re discussing a specific issue – IMHO the GOI has goofed up spectacularly. Its this atmosphere of incompetence and unwillingness to recognise its fault that makes India a fertile ground for evil to creep in. Read Imtiaz Ahmed’s “Reading Gramsci in the days of Hindutva”, and you realise that the moral atmosphere in India is similar to that of Italy and Germany prior to Mussolini and Hitler taking over. The conditions are just right.

Its this atmosphere, where, due to liberties getting ‘inadvertantly’ chopped off, people don’t notice when real tyranny comes to power. Read Gramsci, and you will realise that tyranny does not need a bloodbath to become powerful – it only needs a morally ambiguous atmosphere – where people start saying ‘I don’t mind some liberties getting trampled – I’m not getting affected myself, and anyway the government is actually doing it for my own good.’

Incidentally, why don’t we aree to get off commenting on this post and carry on with GB’s next post ‘Censorship gone wrong’, which is essentially on the same subject?

there obviously are more good than bad in the govt, which is why we have gotten to where we are. if the opposite were true, the ban on some & temporary outage should be the last worries.

i didnt mean to say that i thought the govt was/is right. Under the current circumstances, this is a *reasonable* step to take. good or bad, time will tell.

@hariprasad poojary: you had said”..There were no riots after the blasts in Mumbai during the nineties.” – i had misread, my bad. apologies.

Thanks for calling me nuts.

You said
“after the serial blasts in bombay (dec 92), there was widespread violence, because of hatred preached by *interested parties*. Most of the *real* culprits probably got away, common man on the street suffered.”

There is a difference between the Masjid demolition and the Blasts, I hope.
There were riots engineered after the Masjid demolition and not after the serial blasts of 93. Period.

And yes, please do get your facts right. It would have been better if you could have gone through the link yourself. Nothing like educating onesef, I say.

Cheers,
HP

The fault of the ISPs – to do what the government tells them to do, without the gumption to tell the GOI that their intention will not work. (I get a queasy feeling that the ISPs are aware that doing so would make them seem suspicious in the eyes of the government officials)

I don’t know your experience, but my limited contact with the GOI bureaucrats has convinced me that they act first and think afterwards. Which is why we spend several hundred mandays responding to proposed legislations pointing out the disastrous consequences of their proposals, essentially doing what they should have done in the first place – i.e thinking through various scenarios before acting.

I know that nobody can be 100% sure of the consequences of their action. unfortunately the GOI mandarins have a particularly smug attitude that they know the best. So, my friend, I would not like to follow your example and feel convinced that the GOI has done the right thing.

You see, I do not think that the GOI is evil – just that a vast majority of ministers and officials are fairly incompetent. Thank heavens for the few competent persons who actually keep the country running.

@PP: I wish I was more convinced that the GOI deserves the credit for thinking out diaboilcally logical process pointed out in your comment. You see, IMHO the ministry officials are neither Sun Tsu, nor Chanakya, nor Machiavelli. They are (usually) a bunch of plodders who muddle along in the best style of our erstwhile British masters. Quite likely all that actually happenned is that there was a goof-up, and after the outrage, the goof-up has been corrected and a suitable scapegoat is being found to whom the blame can be assigned. As of now it is the ISPs.