Updated On: 25 August, 2012 08:48 AM IST | | Rohan Joshi
Our government needs a crash course in humour. Here goes...
This week on my favourite show, Man vs Sense, the Indian government (‘Man’) took on the exodus of thousands of North-Eastern citizens back to their homes. The government’s response to the exodus, and the rumours causing them, was typically entertaining; it throttled SMS counts, and then tried to kill the Internet. I refer to the banning of ‘parody accounts’, a bunch of accounts that mocked the Prime Minister’s official Twitter account, which is @PMOIndia. There are several impostors, with names like PM0India, PM0_India and iPoonamPandey. The first two make jokes, but the third one is the most realistic, because it is forever making promises to the hungry common man that it never keeps.
This blocking sparked off a furious debate on censorship, and the Internet reacted in the only way it knows; it branded the UPA government the devil, and denounced it as the worst thing to have happened to the universe since Yanni. The UPA defended itself by suggesting that some of the Twitter accounts in question were dangerous because they had ‘communal overtones’. This is not entirely false; some of those accounts say some pretty daft things (‘Ek Tha Tiger was really good’), but if we’re clamping down on stuff that spreads communal violence, I can think of a few things that we should ban before Twitter accounts; like the UPA, and the BJP, and every Indian election campaign ever.