India’s surging porn users rebel against surprise ban of 857 websites

NEW DELHI, India — Porn consumption is surging in India, and the government apparently doesn’t know what to do about it.

This past week, authorities went from banning 857 “immoral and indecent” websites without warning (including meme websites like CollegeHumor.com) to quickly reversing their decision when a deluge of rage from deprived internet users rained down upon them.

Starting last Sunday, users who clicked on one of the 857 sites were led to a blank page saying “Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India.”

The surprise ban shocked users and generated widespread outrage. The Telecommunications Ministry defended itself by saying the ban was a response to criticism from India’s Supreme Court saying the government was not doing enough to block child pornography.

Despite this claim, no research on child pornography was actually carried out by the government; it simply removed all the websites listed by a petitioner last year who sought for all adult websites to be banned.

“It is worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic,” Kamlesh Vaswani wrote in his petition. “It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped.”

He claimed that rising consumption of pornography was causing the spike in sexual violence in India, a view widely shared in the country. Last month, the Supreme Court rejected the petitioner’s proposal, stating that a complete ban would be a violation of privacy and the constitutional right to personal liberty.

The ruling led to a premature sigh of relief in the country. According to Google Trends, India is the fifth largest consumer of pornography in the world. New Delhi, Mumbai and Pune show the highest search volume for porn among cities across the globe. Searches for porn as a proportion of all searches have steadily risen, and have doubled in the last five years. Three Indian ministers made headlines in 2012 when they were caught watching pornography during a state assembly session.

According to a 2014 report by the popular adult website Pornhub, half of India’s visitors access the site on their mobile phones, coming in third in Android traffic after the US and UK. Pornhub’s 2015 report, released last week, found that 30 percent of their Indian users are women— well above the worldwide average of 24 percent.

No surprise, then, that Twitter and Reddit users were furious on discovering the ban, and a public outcry raged for three days alleging moral policing by a Hindu nationalist government already going strong on beef bans and entertainment censorship.  

The lack of debate or public notice before the ban heightened the criticism. A high-level government meeting was called on Tuesday, and by the evening, internet service providers were given a conditional option of unblocking websites which did not host child pornography.

"I reject with contempt the charge that it is a Talibani government,” telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in response to criticism by the opposition in parliament. “Our government supports free media, respect communication on social media and has respected freedom of communication always."

However, it's not all over. Internet providers will be unblocking websites at their own risk, and a final order through the judiciary is expected this week. What has free speech advocates worried is a proposal to install an ombudsman who has the power to ban websites deemed offensive. Indians know from experience that that may cover a wide range — a very wide range — of subjects.