Our Intelligence Bureau as Art Censor

Notices in the Goa newspapers that the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai was accepting applications from artists for their 2015 exhibition season led me to take along a CD of my work (of which I provide a few samples below), on a trip to the city on 21 September.

The Gallery’s web site said that in addition to submitting the CDs in the month of September, artists should pay Re.200 for an application form: the selection committee would consider both in making its decisions in the next few weeks.

The web site was quite specific that the applications were for the 2015 season.

At the Gallery office a lady directed me to the adjacent Library room, saying the CD would have to be inspected before acceptance.

In the Library, a man peremptorily dismissed my submission because I was “not on the list.”

He further said that application forms were only available for the 2021 season.

When I referred to the Gallery’s published guidelines, his lip curled in contempt: “I don’t know what you saw.”

I could not appeal to higher authority, for the Secretary of the Gallery was away and would not be back until the 10th of October.

From experience I would say that this is yet another piece of work by rogue members of the Intelligence Bureau who seem to think I need to be punished for writing about the agency’s unconstitutional existence and complete lack of accountability.

The British designed and used the Intelligence Bureau as an instrument of oppression, and after independence our netas took no action to either cleanse it or bring it within some form of constitutionally accountable framework.

Worse, the politicians nominally in charge have pandered to its corruptions.

A corrupt media dependent on a stream of IB leaks to feed its hunger for scandals to expose have been disinclined to cover any of this.

The entirely predictable result has been the emergence of the Intelligence Bureau as a threat to our democratic system.

It should be the subject of judicial and parliamentary probes and a determined effort at reform helped by those within it committed to protecting civil rights and democratic values.

And now for something completely different:

 

Film Stars: Acrylic on Canvas 25X39 inches

 Whirligigs: Acrylic on paper 14X22 inches

 Kali Yuga: Acrylic on canvas 36X42 inches

 Mother India: Acrylic on canvas 36X49 inches

 God's Own Country  Acrylic on canvas 50X37 inches

Goa Days  Acrylic on paper 22X30 inches

Censorship

A few weeks ago I sounded off at a meeting of bloggers in Goa about how someone – either at Google or an outside hacker – had introduced hundreds of “robot.txt blocks” on my site.

These instruct search engines not to look at specific things you have written; in effect, they are censors.

In the last year, the number of robot.txt blocks on my site has climbed steadily and is now 791.

Meanwhile, the total number of urls from my site indexed by Google has fallen from about 800 to nearly half that figure, a sure sign of malign interference. (The total should only go up for it is cumulative.)

There has been a resounding lack of response to my appeals for help addressed to Google and the blogspot community.

One of the other participants at the meeting who seemed to have an inside track to Google expresssed interest in my predicament and I held out hope that something constructive would result.

Something has happened, but not what I hoped. 

The “Total Indexed” graph line no longer descends from 800; it now ascends from 0 to 512 on 1/6/13, peaks at 646 on 5/12/13, and then drops to the current 465.

Meanwhile, the graph line showing the number of urls “Ever Crawled” on my site  was at 717 when the “Total Indexed” is shown at 0, an obvious anomaly. (The "Ever Crawled" figure is now 807.)

The number of robot.txt blocks was 586 when the Total Indexed is shown at 0!

The mysterious statistical volatility on my site has not affected the selection of anodyne keywords Google uses as identifiers of my ever controversial blog. These are the top 20 keywords it associates with undiplomatictimes:

1. Indian (4 variants)

2. Post (3 variants)

3. January

4. February

5. World

6. March

7. November

8. British

9. New

10. December

11. Blog (4 variants)

12. August

13. Nations (3 variants)

14. Countries (3 variants)

15. United (2 variants)

16. China (3 variants)

17. April

18. Britain (2 variants)

19. Atom (2 variants)

20. June

In a certain twisted sort of way it is flattering that the high and the mighty, with all the resources of Western mass media at their command, should feel the need to censor my tiny voice. It can only be taken as signalling an intense insecurity.

The Thought Police are Back!

I have noted several times that some shadowy agency/individual has inserted a great number of robot.text files (650 at last count) to block search engines from finding content on my blog (see here for embedded links).

As Blogger does not allow users of its service to approach it directly for help, I posted the problem on the Webmaster Tools forum. Extraordinarily, there was not a single reply. A repeat post noting that I was being censored elicited one reply suggesting that the robot.text files were blocking not the overall site but specific labels I insert under each post to help Search Engines identify the nature of its content.

To find out if that was correct I checked on Webmaster Tools for the list of top keywords indexed for my blog. What I found confirms that the dreaded Thought Police are indeed back on my case. These are, in order of significance, the top 20 keywords Google bots have registered for the wide ranging content of my blog:

1. indian (4 variants)
2. post (3 variants)
3. february
4. january
5. world (4 variants)
6. british
7. march
8. blog (3 variants)
9. new (2 variants)
10. november
11. december
12. nations (3 variants)
13. country (3 variants)
14. august
15. atom (2 variants)
16. china (3 variants)
17. united (4 variants)
18. hindu (2 variants)
19. britain (2 variants)
20. people (3 variants)

 This blatant effort to limit the visibility of my site cannot be done without the cooperation of Google but must originate from some more ideological entity that wants to prevent me from being heard.

I do not think that entity is Indian for the simple reason that authorities in New Delhi do not have the capacity to take such nuanced strategically directed action: their forte is the other heavy-handed stuff I have reported. 

Meanwhile, at the suggestion of a reader, I have filed electronically a grievance with the Home Ministry about the possible involvement of some agency under its purview in the strange circumstances that prevented me from attending the World Social Forum in Tunisia.

After filing the grievance it struck me that whoever is responsible for my Kafkaesque situation can easily justify his/her actions by lying about my record to make it seem sinister.

At some point, legal action might be necessary to get the facts out in the open. I hope those who have cooperated with the goons persecuting me will remember we still live in a democracy and give evidence when asked.

Creepy Crawly Update

The visitor counter on my blog disappeared after I published the Midnight's Children review.

It has done so a number of times over the years, always in the wake of a post with a significant number of readers.

The disappearance of the counter led me to check what Webmaster Tools had to say about the health of the site. This is what I found:

• On 2 February 2012 the Google search engine had indexed 217 URLs on my site and none had been blocked by a robot.txt. (A robot.txt is used by the owner of a web site to block search engines from indexing outdated information.)

• On 9 September 2012, the number of indexed URLs on my site peaked at 774; since then it has dropped precipitously and now stands at 529. Webmaster Tools says such a drop indicates the site has been hacked.

• On 4 November 2012, the day I posted "The Implications of Scandalmania," the number of blocked URLs on my blog shot up from 0 to 516.

•  On 3 February 2013 (the latest data available), the number of indexed URLs was 529 and the number of blocked URLs stood at 594.

• On two occasions the site had returned "not found" error notices to the Google search bot.

• The number of other sites linked to the Undiplomatictimes blog has dropped from over 450 to 64.

• The "search" function on the blog has been disabled, so readers cannot find an old item by typing in a keyword. 

These developments mean that some technically competent entity -- institutional or individual -- wants to minimize the number of readers I have.

Heading my suspect list are the rich and powerful people who run India's anti-national "elite" media.  They have the motive and the means to hack and censor.

It is also possible that the nebulous Thought Police who had me in their sights in New York have followed me to India.

The TP were a constant presence in my life during the decades I spent covering the United Nations. In the post 9/11 period, they put bugs in my phones and car, and just so I would know, occasionally brought them noisily alive with police chatter or racist hate radio. They would also routinely delay invitations to prevent my attendance at receptions and other events that would be news-gathering opportunities.
 

[Ironically, the TP also arranged widespread photocopying of my copyrighted $200-a-year newsletter to supply copies to UN insiders and deny me critically needed funds. On one occasion, alerted by a UN staff-member who had been told to photocopy my weekly output for distribution to top brass, I complained to the Secretary-General's Spokesman. That led to a meeting with an official of the UN Legal Office who threatened to take away my Press credentials if I pressed the matter. I wrote to the Secretary-General asking if he supported that threat and elicited an offer to settle. After doing some research I submitted an estimate of 135 pirated copies over several years. It led to nothing. A New York lawyer I consulted told me not to bother pursuing the matter, as the UN was notorious for copyright violation and could not be brought to book because it was immune from prosecution.]  

In earlier Creepy Crawly posts from Pondicherry I have noted the activities of the TP after my return to India. (See here and here.) Since then, the intimidating surveillance seems to have stopped, at least for now.

In Goa the surveillance continues but I get the feeling it is benign and maybe even protective. Perhaps someone in the Intelligence Bureau has found time to actually read my blog.

PS: All this should perhaps be seen as a continuation of the theme of the previous post on how the British dominate the global narrative.

Do Indians Have Less Freedom Than Americans?

Another piece of feel-bad journalism  came our way on 11 December from The New York Times blog on India.

Business Standard columnist Nilanjana Roy made the case that Indians have less freedom of expression than Americans. “The framers of the United States Constitution so highly valued free speech that they enshrined it in the document’s very first amendment” she wrote. “India, the world’s other mammoth democracy, has a first amendment too, but its intent and meaning are quite the opposite.”

 She quoted from a “sharp” analysis by one Lawrence Liang, a “legal expert” who had noted the “irony” that in the United States the phrase “the First Amendment” refers to the “almost absolute” right to free speech, while in India, it is a reference “to the attempt to ‘strengthen state regulation over free speech’.”

While allowing that India had a freer Press “than countries like Iraq, Malaysia, Afghanistan, China and North Korea,” Ms. Roy noted that New York-based Freedom House placed India 77th in its national ranking, “along with Bulgaria and East Timor, behind South Africa, South Korea and Lithuania.” Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres put it even lower, 122nd, “below Congo, Indonesia and Nepal. Ms. Roy seemed unaware that both organizations are essentially purveyors of propaganda.

 Recalling that New Delhi had first constrained the Indian Constitution’s pledge of the fundamental right to free speech and expression in 1951, she said it reflected “not just political expediency, but perhaps a larger and very Indian discomfort with the idea of untrammeled freedom of expression.” From that ignorant tarring of a culture that has for three millennia encouraged an uninhibited examination of every topic under the sun, Ms. Roy then descended to the minutiae of book banning in independent India.

“The 1955 ban on Aubrey Menen’s “Rama Retold” revealed a discomfort with religious parody and inquiries into faith. A ban in 1959 on Alexander Campbell’s “Heart of India” was an early indicator of a very Indian prickliness about “outsider” histories that show the country in a bad light.”

She did not mention the political background to those developments, namely, the communal bloodshed the British masterminded to create their proxy, Pakistan. It killed a million Indians and left a huge raw wound in our political system that has only partially healed. Since independence, Britain has continued a relentless campaign to subvert India, using religion to manipulate people.

Meanwhile, British "historians" have generated a ceaseless flow of propaganda to mislead and confuse Indians. Censorship is the least desirable way to try and prevent such manipulation, but that seems to be the best our inept politicians today can do. It is regrettable but necessary.

Ms. Roy also avoided any mention of book banning by American authorities, federal, state and local. The list of texts that have come under challenge is not short. It includes books ranging from Candide, The Decameron and Tropic of Cancer to Grapes of Wrath, Catch 22 and the Pentagon Papers. These and a multitude of other bans have been overturned, but only after much legal wrangling. Fanny Hill, written in 1749, was not cleared of obscenity charges until 1966.

During the McCarthy period (1950s), the Committee on Un-American Activities of the United States Congress effectively banned not only books but writers, actors and other film personalities, driving many to penury and some to suicide.

 Those were, of course, the bad old days of the Cold War, but can we say that such atrocities will never be repeated when 13 media organizations in New York felt it necessary a few days ago to complain jointly that city police were preventing them from covering the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters?

As a writer for the online media report Fishbowl reported, “there were many journalists barred from covering the eviction, and some were even dealt with physically. Josh Harkinson, a writer for the website Mother Jones, said he was 'violently shoved', another reported that it ‘was getting scary’ and a New York Post journalist was allegedly ‘in a choke-hold,’ according to NY1′s Lindsey Christ. Animal New York added that last night it witnessed a NBC reporter having his press credentials taken away by police, and The New York Daily News just had a reporter arrested.”

In conclusion, it is necessary to note that comparing India and the United States is a fruitless task. The two countries are completely different in culture and circumstance, and decisions such as curtailing free speech cannot be subjected to a common measure. Having said that, I must add that despite the sobering constraints on my own blog, India is doing pretty well.

Creepy Crawly Feeling - 2

As a result of the item that someone was blocking my blog and main website, Netsparx, the Goa-based company maintaining www.undiplomatictimes.com unceremoniously dumped me as a client. In the process I discovered the actual ISP is Bagful.net in Haryana. Netsparx has not responded to repeated queries whether information to access my site was given to anyone else.

Google reported on 2 December that its crawlers received the 404 error (not found) response from the entire blog site as well as from the following specific items:

1. The Indian Press - 6: The Press as Business (posted July 2011)
2. The Indian Press- 7 a: The Foreign Hand (posted August 2011)
3. NYT Blog Asks Why no Indian Steve Jobs (posted October 2011)
4. What Are They Advertising? (posted October 2011)
5. Posts relating to keywords India and China.

The list indicates an attempt to restrict access to what I have to say about the Indian mass media, advertising, and their foreign connections. (By the way, The Indian Press - 7 b: Foreign Links, has been delayed by the need to further research the very extensive ties that bind our media to Britain.)

Meanwhile, according to a Google report on 2 December, the visibility of the blog on the worldwide web continued to be restricted by 343 robot.txt files. (Those files signal search engine "crawlers" not to report the contents of the site.)

Who is responsible for this?

It is difficult to say right now. Will post on any discoveries as I continue to ask around.

Meanwhile, would appreciate reposting by readers who do have access to the blog.