Here comes the Stalinist State

The Union Home Ministry’s call to citizens to become ‘cyber volunteers’ and identify, flag and report illegal, unlawful and “anti-national” online content is perhaps the most brazen and dangerous sign yet of an attempt to turn our democratic and free society into a ‘Surveillance State’. Though vigilante activities directed against individuals, social groups and communities have spread and increased in the past few years and the State has ignored and sometimes even patronised them, it was not expected that the State itself would set up a virtual vigilante force. The move amounts to that, and the first step has actually been taken. The programme is to be implemented as a pilot project in, unsurprisingly, Jammu & Kashmir and Tripura, and then extended to other states. The J&K police has told citizens to “register as volunteers through a dedicated section ‘Cyber Volunteers’ on National Cybercrime Reporting Portal.”

The volunteers are to flag and report child sexual abuse, rape, terrorism, “radicalisation” and “anti-national” activities of others on social media. This has dangerous consequences for citizens’ rights and freedom and for society and politics. In the first place, it is illegal, whatever the explanations and justifications that might be given for it, because it violates the fundamental rights to freedom of speech and privacy. The Supreme Court’s guidelines have laid down that only online speech that disrupts public order and incites violence can be acted against under the law, but can that judgement be left to the government’s cyber hordes? Words like “radicalisation’’ and “anti-national’’ are not legally defined and it will be left to the interests and prejudices of the volunteers to decide what they mean. In times when words and protests against the government are dubbed “anti-national’’, it is clear who the targets will be. This will certainly be misused. In any case, it is the State’s responsibility to identify and take action against offences on social media and it cannot shift that to the ordinary citizen who may have personal, political or other reasons to implicate others.

The volunteers will have to retain confidentiality about their work. That means, they are to be a secret police reporting on people, the way people are spied on in dictatorships. The Gestapo had civil informants and the Stalinist State had a network of informers. The system being developed in India will work much the same way, with citizens ratting on others and the heavy hand of the State coming down on those who do not conform and those whom it does not like. Trust between citizens will be broken and we will all have to live in fear of each other. Who is it in the Modi government who aspires to be Lavrentiy Beria?