Censorship in India
Encyclopedia
Censorship in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

mainly targets religious issues. The Constitution of India
Constitution of India
The Constitution of India is the supreme law of India. It lays down the framework defining fundamental political principles, establishes the structure, procedures, powers, and duties of government institutions, and sets out fundamental rights, directive principles, and the duties of citizens...

 guarantees freedom of expression
Freedom of expression in India
The Constitution of India contains the right to freedom, given in articles 19, 20, 21 and 22, with the view of guaranteeing individual rights that were considered vital by the framers of the constitution...

 but places certain restrictions on content, with a view towards maintaining communal and religious harmony, given the history of communal tension in the nation.

In 2011, the report Freedom in the World by Freedom House
Freedom House
Freedom House is an international non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C. that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights...

 gave India a political rights rating of 2, and a civil liberties rating of 3, earning it the designation of free. The rating scale runs from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free).

Obscenity law

Any activity that involves public show of pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

 is illegal and attracts several penal provisions. However, Central Board of Film Certification
Central Board of Film Certification
The Central Board of Film Certification is a Government of India regulatory body and censorship board of India controlled by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It reviews, rates and censors motion pictures, television shows, television ads, and promotional material...

 allows release of certain films with sexually explicit content (labeled A-rated), which are to be shown only in restricted spaces and to be viewed only by people of age 18 and above. Even India's public television broadcaster, Doordarshan
DoorDarshan
Doordarshan is an Indian public service broadcaster, a division of Prasar Bharati. It is one of the largest broadcasting organizations in India in terms of the infrastructure of studios and transmitters. Recently, it has also started Digital Terrestrial Transmitters. On September 15, 2009,...

 has aired adult films. Films, television shows and music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...

s are prone to scene cuts or even bans, however if any literature is banned, it is not usually for pornographic reasons. Pornographic magazines are technically illegal, but many softcore
Softcore
Softcore pornography is a form of filmic or photographic pornography or erotica that is less sexually explicit than hardcore pornography. It is intended to tickle and arouse men and women. Softcore pornography depicts nude and semi-nude performers engaging in casual social nudity or non-graphic...

 Indian publications are available through many news vendors, who often stock them at the bottom of a stack of non-pornographic magazines, and make them available on request. In practice, the police usually ignores this as long as the display itself does not contain nudity. Most non-Indian publications (including Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...

) are usually harder to find, whether softcore or hardcore
Hardcore pornography
Hardcore pornography is a form of pornography that features explicit sexual acts. The term was coined in the second half of the 20th century to distinguish it from softcore pornography. It usually takes the form of photographs, often displayed in magazines or on the Internet, or films. It can also...

. Mailing pornographic magazines to India from a country where they are legal is also illegal in India. In practice, the magazines are almost always confiscated by Customs
Customs
Customs is an authority or agency in a country responsible for collecting and safeguarding customs duties and for controlling the flow of goods including animals, transports, personal effects and hazardous items in and out of a country...

 and entered as evidence of law-breaking, which then undergoes detailed scrutiny.

National security

The Official Secrets Act 1923
Official Secrets Act 1923
The Official Secrets Act 1923 is India's anti-espionage act held over from British colonisation. It states clearly that any action which involves helping an enemy state against India. It also states that one cannot approach, inspect, or even pass over a prohibited government site or area...

 is used for the protection of official information, mainly related to national security
National security
National security is the requirement to maintain the survival of the state through the use of economic, diplomacy, power projection and political power. The concept developed mostly in the United States of America after World War II...

.

Press

In 1975 Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhara was an Indian politician who served as the third Prime Minister of India for three consecutive terms and a fourth term . She was assassinated by Sikh extremists...

 government imposed censorship of press in The Emergency. It was removed at the end of the Emergency rule.http://books.google.co.nz/books?q=+subject:%22Freedom+of+the+press%22

Film

The Central Board of Film Certification, the regulatory film body of India, regularly orders directors to remove anything it deems offensive, including sex, nudity, violence or subjects considered politically subversive.

In 2002, the film War and Peace, depicting scenes of nuclear testing
Nuclear testing
Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the effectiveness, yield and explosive capability of nuclear weapons. Throughout the twentieth century, most nations that have developed nuclear weapons have tested them...

 and the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...

, created by Anand Patwardhan
Anand Patwardhan
Anand Patwardhan is an Indian documentary filmmaker, known for his activism through social action documentaries on topics such as corruption, slum dwellers, nuclear arms race, citizen activism and communalism...

, was asked to make 21 cuts before it was allowed to have the certificate for release. Patwardhan objected, saying "The cuts that they asked for are so ridiculous that they won't hold up in court" and "But if these cuts do make it, it will be the end of freedom of expression in the Indian media." The court decreed the cuts unconstitutional and the film was shown uncut.

In 2002, the Indian filmmaker and former chief of the country's film censor board, Vijay Anand, kicked up a controversy with a proposal to legalise the exhibition of X-rated
X-rated
In some countries, X is or has been a motion picture rating reserved for the most explicit films. Films rated X are intended only for viewing by adults, usually legally defined as people over the age of 17.-United Kingdom:...

 films in selected cinemas across the country, saying "Porn is shown everywhere in India clandestinely... and the best way to fight this onslaught of blue movies is to show them openly in theatres with legally authorised licences". He resigned within a year after taking charge of the censor board after facing widespread criticism of his moves.

In 2003, the Indian Censor Board banned the film 'Gulabi Aaina (The Pink Mirror
The Pink Mirror
The Pink Mirror, the Indian release title Gulabi Aaina is an award-winning Indian film drama produced and directed by Sridhar Rangayan. Said to be the first Indian film to comprehensively focus on Indian transsexuals with the entire story revolving around two transsexuals and a gay teenager's...

)', a film on Indian transsexuals produced and directed by Sridhar Rangayan
Sridhar Rangayan
Sridhar Rangayan ) is an Indian filmmaker who has made films with special focus on queer subjects. His queer films, The Pink Mirror and Yours Emotionally, have been considered groundbreaking because of their realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the largely closeted Indian gay community...

. The censor board cited that the film was 'vulgar and offensive'. The filmmaker appealed twice again unsuccessfully. The film still remains banned
Banned films
For nearly the entire history of film production, certain films have been banned by film censorship or review organizations for political or moral reasons...

 in India, but has screened at numerous festivals all over the world and won awards. The critics have appluaded it for its 'sensitive and touching portrayal of marginalized community'. BBC, YIDFF, Queer India

In 2004, the documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 Final Solution, which looks at religious rioting between Hindus and Muslims, was banned. The film follows 2002 clashes in the western state of Gujarat, which left more than 1,000 people dead. The censor board justified the ban, saying it was "highly provocative and may trigger off unrest and communal violence". The ban was lifted in Oct.'04 after a sustained campaign.

In 2006, seven states
States and territories of India
India is a federal union of states comprising twenty-eight states and seven union territories. The states and territories are further subdivided into districts and so on.-List of states and territories:...

 (Nagaland
Nagaland
Nagaland is a state in the far north-eastern part of India. It borders the state of Assam to the west, Arunachal Pradesh and part of Assam to the north, Burma to the east and Manipur to the south. The state capital is Kohima, and the largest city is Dimapur...

, Punjab
Punjab (India)
Punjab ) is a state in the northwest of the Republic of India, forming part of the larger Punjab region. The state is bordered by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh to the east, Haryana to the south and southeast and Rajasthan to the southwest as well as the Pakistani province of Punjab to the...

, Goa
Goa
Goa , a former Portuguese colony, is India's smallest state by area and the fourth smallest by population. Located in South West India in the region known as the Konkan, it is bounded by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and by Karnataka to the east and south, while the Arabian Sea forms its...

, Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...

, Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh , is one of the 28 states of India, situated on the southeastern coast of India. It is India's fourth largest state by area and fifth largest by population. Its capital and largest city by population is Hyderabad.The total GDP of Andhra Pradesh is $100 billion and is ranked third...

) have banned the release or exhibition of the Hollywood movie The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code (film)
The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 American mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard. The screenplay was written by Akiva Goldsman and based on Dan Brown's worldwide bestselling 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code...

(and also the book
The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery-detective novel written by Dan Brown. It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu as they investigate a murder in Paris's Louvre Museum and discover a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus having been married to...

), although India's Central Board of Film Certification
Central Board of Film Certification
The Central Board of Film Certification is a Government of India regulatory body and censorship board of India controlled by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. It reviews, rates and censors motion pictures, television shows, television ads, and promotional material...

 cleared the film for adult viewing throughout India. However, the respective high courts lifted the ban and the movie was shown in the two states.

Music

Heavy Metal band Slayer's
Slayer
Slayer is an American thrash metal band formed in Huntington Park, California, in 1981 by guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King. Slayer rose to fame with their 1986 release, Reign in Blood, and is credited as one of the "Big Four" thrash metal acts, along with Metallica, Megadeth and...

 2006 album Christ Illusion
Christ Illusion
Christ Illusion is the tenth studio album by the American thrash metal band Slayer. Released on August 8, 2006, the album received generally favorable critical reviews, and it entered the Billboard 200 at number 5—the band's highest U.S. chart position to date...

 was banned in India after catholic churches in the country took offense to the artwork of the album and a few song titles and launched a protest against it. The album was taken off shelves and the remaining catalog was burnt by EMI Music India.

The Indian censor board also censors harmless humour by muting comedy dialogues, and this sort of unnecessary and abject thought policing is very commonly practiced in censorship of Indian Tamil films.

Dramas

In 1999 Maharashtra
Maharashtra
Maharashtra is a state located in India. It is the second most populous after Uttar Pradesh and third largest state by area in India...

 government banned the Marathi
Marathi language
Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. It is the official language of the state of Maharashtra. There are over 68 million fluent speakers worldwide. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India and is the fifteenth most...

 play 'Me Nathuram Godse
Nathuram Godse
Nathuram Vinayak Godse , from the city of Pune, India was a Hindutva activist and journalist, who was the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. Along with his brother Gopal Godse and six other co-conspirators, he executed a plot to assassinate Gandhi.-Early life:Nathuram Godse was born in Baramati, Pune...

 Boltoy" or 'I am Nathuram Godse Speaking"

In 2004, Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues
The Vagina Monologues
The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler which ran at the Off Broadway Westside Theatre after a limited run at AFRICA in 1996. Ensler originally starred in the production which was produced by David Stone, Nina Essman, Dan Markley, The Araca Group, Willa Shalit, Mike Skipper...

" was banned in Chennai. The play however, has played successfully in many, many other parts of the country since 2003. A Hindi version of the play has been performing since 2007.

Maps

In India it is illegal to show the boundaries of India in any way other than the way the Government of India defines them, via the Survey of India
Survey of India
The Survey of India is India's central engineering agency in charge of mapping and surveying. Set up in 1767 to help consolidate the territories of the British East India Company, it is one of the oldest Engineering Departments of the Government of India...

. It is therefore illegal to publish a map that does not show all of Kashmir
Kashmir
Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range...

 as part of India or to depict the disputed areas of Kashmir
Kashmir conflict
The Kashmir conflict is a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region, the northwesternmost region of South Asia....

.

Books

  • 1989, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
    The Satanic Verses
    The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters...

    was banned in India, as it was in many countries, for its purported attacks on Islam
    Islam
    Islam . The most common are and .   : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

    . India was the second country in the world (after Singapore
    Singapore
    Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

    ) to ban the book.
  • 1990, Understanding Islam through Hadis
    Understanding Islam through Hadis
    Understanding Islam through Hadis is a book by Ram Swarup, first published in 1982 in the USA. It was eventually banned in India.The book is a study, based on the English translation by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, of the Sahih Muslim, the second most important collection of Hadiths...

    by Ram Swarup
    Ram Swarup
    Ram Swarup , , born Ram Swarup Agarwal, was an independent Hindu thinker and prolific author. His works took a critical stance against Christianity, Islam and Communism. His work has influenced other Indian writers.- Life :He graduated in Economics at Delhi University in 1941...

     was banned. In 1990 the Hindi translation of the book was banned, and in March 1991 the English original became banned as well.
  • A book on Shivaji by Queens University professor Jayant Lele was also banned. as this book raised a question about Shivaji's father.
  • Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by American scholar James Laine.
  • Laine's translation of the Sivabharata, entitled The Epic of Shivaji, was also banned. The ban followed an attack by Sambhaji
    Sambhaji
    Sambhaji Raje Bhosle was the eldest son and successor to Emporer Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha empire.- Early life :...

     Brigade activists on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
    Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
    The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute is located in Pune, Maharashtra, India. It was founded on July 6, 1917 to honor the life and work of Dr. Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar , long regarded as the founder of Indology in India...

     in Pune
    Pune
    Pune , is the eighth largest metropolis in India, the second largest in the state of Maharashtra after Mumbai, and the largest city in the Western Ghats. Once the centre of power of the Maratha Empire, it is situated 560 metres above sea level on the Deccan plateau at the confluence of the Mula ...

    . The subsequent governments have not revoked the ban.
  • In Punjab the Bhavsagar Granth
    Bhavsagar Granth
    Bhavsagar Granth is a 2,704 page religious treatise said to been written by 30 authors, including Dr. Pritam Singh of Dhudhike village, under the direction of Baba Bhaniara....

     was banned by the state government, following clashes between mainstream Sikhs and the apostate Sikh
    Sikh
    A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...

     sect that produced it. It was said that the granth had copied a number of portions from the Guru Granth Sahib. In one of the photographs it showed Baba Bhaniara
    Baba Bhaniara
    Baba Piara Singh Bhaniara born in 1958, is the spiritual of a breakaway Sikh sect based in Dhamiana village in Ropar, Punjab. He is believed to have once worked as an employee of the Horticulture Department at a sericulture farm in Asmanpur village. He grew up in a modest family, his father Tulsi...

    , wearing a shining coat and headdress in a style similar to that made familiar through the popular posters of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru of the Sikhs. In another Baba Bhaniara is shown riding a horse in the manner of Guru Gobind Singh .
  • The Polyester Prince - (ISBN 1-86448-468-3) a biography of the Indian businessman Dhirubhai Ambani
    Dhirubhai Ambani
    Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani also known as Dhirubhai, was an Indian-Gujarati business magnate and entrepreneur who founded Reliance Industries, a petrochemicals, communications, power, and textiles conglomerate and the only privately owned Indian company in the Fortune 500. Ambani took his company...

     was banned.

Internet

The India country report that is included in Freedom House's
Freedom House
Freedom House is an international non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C. that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights...

 Freedom on the Net 2011 report, says:
  • India's overall Internet Freedom Status is "Partly Free", unchanged from 2009.
  • India has a score of 36 on a scale from 0 (most free) to 100 (least free), which places India 14 out of the 37 countries worldwide that were included in the 2011 report.
  • India ranks second best out of the nine countries in Asia included in the 2011 report.
  • There is no sustained government policy or strategy to block access to Internet content on a large scale, but measures for removing certain content from the web, sometimes for fear they could incite violence, have become more common.
  • Pressure on private companies to remove information that is perceived to endanger public order or national security has increased since late 2009
  • Internet users have sporadically faced prosecution for online postings, and private companies hosting the content are obliged by law to hand over user information to the authorities.
  • Both bloggers and moderators can face libel suits and even criminal prosecution for comments posted by other users on their websites.


India is classified as engaged in "selective" Internet filtering in the conflict/security and Internet tools areas and as showing "no evidence" of filtering in the political and social areas by the OpenNet Initiative
OpenNet Initiative
The OpenNet Initiative is a joint project whose goal is to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employs a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run...

 in May 2007. ONI states that:

As a stable democracy with strong protections for press freedom, India’s experiments with Internet filtering have been brought into the fold of public discourse. The selective censorship of Web sites and blogs since 2003, made even more disjointed by the non-uniform responses of Internet service providers (ISPs), has inspired a clamor of opposition. Clearly government regulation and implementation of filtering are still evolving. … Amidst widespread speculation in the media and blogosphere about the state of filtering in India, the sites actually blocked indicate that while the filtering system in place yields inconsistent results, it nevertheless continues to be aligned with and driven by government efforts. Government attempts at filtering have not been entirely effective, as blocked content has quickly migrated to other Web sites and users have found ways to circumvent filtering. The government has also been criticized for a poor understanding of the technical feasibility of censorship and for haphazardly choosing which Web sites to block. The amended IT Act, absolving intermediaries from being responsible for third-party created content, could signal stronger government monitoring in the future.


A "Transparency Report" from Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 indicates that the Government of India
Government of India
The Government of India, officially known as the Union Government, and also known as the Central Government, was established by the Constitution of India, and is the governing authority of the union of 28 states and seven union territories, collectively called the Republic of India...

 initiated 67 content removal requests between July and December 2010.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK