The new programme to invite citizen volunteers for policing over online contents is one of the most unwise and regressive decisions taken by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). This will not yield the desired results and shall lead to further confusion and overreach on multiple aspects. To begin with, the MHA circular states that the scheme will start as a pilot project in Tripura and Jammu and Kashmir, wherein citizen volunteers will be asked to flag and report rape, terrorism, child sexual abuse, rape, “radicalisation” and “anti-national” activities.
However, ironically, under the prevalent laws, it is nowhere defined as to what constitutes an ‘anti-national activity’. There are umpteen examples of as to how such ambiguous terms without any precise definition can prove lethal to social harmony, especially when common people without knowledge in law or subject to any special order are empowered with such power to decide what can pass the muster to be paraded online and what fall within the reportable category.
Apart from that, authorising ordinary people, without any locus standi, to decide what qualifies for the reportable label or flag shall ultimately land us in a scenario of rampant misuse of the provisions of the scheme and harassment of common man by the common man. The other objectional aspect of the scheme is that there is no statutory foundation for creating such a volunteer force and there is no plan as to how they will be judiciously utilised in the process and how will they be controlled.
To take the discussion further, even if we accept that the Ministry’s mission is actually to counter cybercrimes, it is not understood as to why and how a fundamental state responsibility could be delegated to such citizen volunteers, who in all probability, shall be unregulated and unaccountable to any authority and cannot be completely relied upon regarding how judiciously they would screen and scrutinise fellow citizens. This, therefore, may by all chances turn into ammunitions in the hands of the vested interest groups to satiate their agenda of political or personal vendetta and may also deepen distrust and polarisation and loosen the social fabric.
Most importantly, the whole exercise of making citizens subject to such surveillance and scrutiny without the proper sanction of law and exercise of due process of law is an infringement of their fundamental rights to freedom of speech and expression and privacy.
Moreover, the act of the MHA is a blatant violation of the law laid down by the Supreme Court of India regarding criminalising online speech, as the court, had cautioned while striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 that there needs to be a distinction between speech that is simply ‘offensive or annoying’ and between that which is capable of inciting a ‘disruption of public order, or violence’. And under the MHA’s scheme, it is not practicable to expect citizen volunteers to exercise such prudence capable of drawing a distinction as discussed.
This programme seems to be an extension of the idea of blanket gag on online criticism of the State Government in Bihar, the Uttarakhand police’s drive to scrutinise social media for ‘anti-national’ posts. It is true that social media today is the new platform to initiate and lead revolutions, political battles, campaigns, electoral contests and even the ongoing farmer protests.
Social media seems to be all pervading and deeply penetrating into the social psychology, but such unmindful outsourcing of the Government’s authority to ‘scrutinise social media posts’ to the volunteer’s corps from amongst the common man without due regulation mechanism in place and where scrutiny by technical and legal experts is required is both disturbing and against rule of law. The move will only pave the way for raising a permanent army of vigilantes with a right to infringe on the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression and privacy of the fellow citizens and shall only strengthen the growing public perception that this Government is in favour of persecuting citizens daring to disagree and dissent, which is unwelcome in a presumably-robust democracy like that of ours.
(The writer is a lawyer and public policy expert and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law & Media Studies at School of Mass Communication, KIIT University. He can be reached at sjyotiranjan3@gmail.com.)