History of Free Speech in India & Modern Online Content Regulation
Defamation, sedition, religious harmony, and more throughout India's history.
The following is a seminar paper written by Akhilesh Pillalamarri in Spring 2022. The seminar was called “Free Speech and Privacy in the Digital Age: Advanced Topics in Global Online Freedom,” and was taught by Professor Dawn Carla Nunziato, an internationally recognized expert in the area of free speech and the Internet.
*Note, many sources quoted in this paper use British and Indian English spellings.
INTRODUCTION
The Republic of India is the world’s second-most populous country, with an approximate population of 1.4 billion people in 2022.[1] India is a liberal democracy with strong institutions and a constitution containing articles guaranteeing civil rights—including freedom of speech—inspired by the American and British traditions. Nonetheless, India’s constitutional and laws also permit restrictions on speech stemming from its cultural, religious, and political history. These norms are a reflection of both government policy and social expectations. In particular, restrictions on free expression in India arise from two impulses. First, the need to protect the honor of individuals, and especially groups, from insults. In a hierarchical society composed of many ethnic, religious, and caste groups, defaming the beliefs of a community or the community itself is an act against the status, power, and standing of a group and therefore is often a direct incitement to violence. This is therefore directly related to the second impulse for restricting speech in India—security. Security, both national security and domestic security—public order—in a society characterized by frequent communal violence, ethnic rebellion, terrorism, and hostile neighbors such as Pakistan and China, is paramount in the view of the state and much of society. Therefore, colonial-era laws against sedition and the incitement to violence, and against the promotion of communal disharmony continue to be upheld and used vigorously. This paper discusses the origins, rationale, and evolution of India’s speech norms from ancient times to the colonial era, before exploring these norms in the context of contemporary democratic India, and ultimately in the context of the internet and social media. It concludes by describing how India regulates defamation, sedition, and conduct that incites communal disharmony in the online realm, and what this may mean for the internet and social media platforms there and globally.
India has the second-highest number of internet users, after China, at around 622 million people.[2] This number does not even represent half of India’s potential online population: by 2025, an estimated 900 million Indians are projected to be on the internet.[3] Almost all new Indian users are accessing the internet through cell phones, which are spreading rapidly in rural India due to cheaper data plans and availability of interfaces and content in local languages, as opposed to English, the language preferred by the elite.[4] More Indian internet users now access it in Hindi—the most spoken language in India—as well as other Indian languages, than those who use it in English.[5] India has some of the world’s cheapest data plans because Jio, a telecommunications company that is a subsidiary of Reliance, India’s largest company, drove down prices starting in 2017 in order to expand its market, sparking a dash to lower prices amongst its competitors.[6] Due to the fact that many large, U.S.-based social media platforms are blocked in China, India has the largest number of users of WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. As of this writing—and the numbers are rapidly growing—there are 500 million[7] users of WhatsApp in India, 425 million[8] users of YouTube, 340 million[9] users of Facebook, and 201 million[10] users of Instagram. India also had the most users of the China-based app TikTok until it was banned in June 2020 for geopolitical reasons.[11]
These numbers underscore the importance of India to any discussion on the future of speech norms, both online and offline. India, soon to be the most populous country in the world, has the demographic weight to influence the laws and policies of other countries, particularly other post-colonial countries in the “global south.” Moreover, India’s speech norms can have an impact on the policies of global social media platforms due to its large population and market.
India’s online regulatory regime targeting sedition, foreign applications, as well as its new 2021 rules is characterized by a concern for public order, national security, and group harmony that often takes precedence over individual rights and freedom of expression. These concerns make India’s regulation of speech unique in that it attempts to maintain freedom of speech within a liberal democracy while also balancing this against public order concerns that are often more a feature of autocracies.
Nationalism, religious revivalism, and jingoism are thriving in large parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and government policies in those states reflect the preferences and norms of their populations, many of which may seem “illiberal” relative to the norms prevalent in the West. For example, India’s ban of the Chinese mobile application TikTok in June 2020 came after clashes between the two countries on their Himalayan border over a long-standing territorial dispute, and had nothing to do with the substantive content found on the application.[12] India also shut down the internet in the Kashmir valley for several months in 2019-2020 in order to prevent terrorism and public disorder.[13] (Jammu and Kashmir is a Muslim-majority territory disputed between India and Pakistan, but mostly administered by India.) India’s attitudes are parallel to those of other countries outside of the West that have banned entire websites or walled off parts of their internet due to perceived national security and geopolitical threats: Russia blocked or restricted most U.S. social media platforms in March 2022 after the West imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.[14] Countries have also restricted the internet to reflect local norms, such as Pakistan, which suddenly banned TikTok for several months in 2021 for “lewd” content.[15]
India is a paradigmatic case study in how local cultural norms, expectations and security concerns intersect with freedom of speech and the regulation of the internet. India’s history, culture, and legal evolution demonstrate a long tradition of socially and politically acceptable limits to free speech in the interests of public order, national security, sedition, group harmony, and other factors related to social and political harmony. Personal and group honor is also highly esteemed, more so than absolute individual rights and freedoms. As a result, Indian law both intersects and departs from the community standards of global social media platforms, most of which are based in the United States, and are more influenced by American and European norms. While Indian standards may not seem ideal from the Western perspective, they demonstrate that if local concerns are addressed, social media companies can continue to operate openly and independently.
To understand free speech and the internet in India, it is therefore important to begin with how India’s unique—cultural, religious, and historical—norms evolved.
SPEECH NORMS IN ANCIENT & MEDIEVAL INDIA
Since antiquity, virtually every society with a recorded history has had speech taboos, often enforced by the law. In modern parlance, we would call these restrictions on expression. These restrictions were dictated by social custom, religious norms, and political considerations. The Greek philosopher Socrates was sentenced by the Athenian state to drink poison because he preached against the traditional gods and “corrupted the youth.”[16] Limits on expression are therefore functions of what a society considers too important to publicly malign.
India can be characterized as a society of societies, or a population of populations.[17] Individuals were historically part of larger society by virtue of being part of a smaller social group, of which there were thousands. Indeed, before the onset of Western modernity in India during the colonial period, a person’s identity, place in society, food, clothing, profession, and social duties were largely determined by which social group they belonged to. These social groups—not individuals—were the basic unit of Indian society, and protecting group rights, as opposed to individual rights, has always been a mainstay of Indian law and custom. They are often referred to as castes in both contemporary India and the West, but the term needs elucidation. Outside of India, caste is often used to translate the Sanskrit idea of varna, or the often-theoretical socioeconomic and ritual stratification of society into four hierarchical ranks: “the brahmins (priests, intellectuals), kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), vaishyas (merchants, artisans, some farmers), and shudras (laborers).”[18] Below these four classes were the dalits or untouchables. However, varna is often a classification scheme into which thousands of jatis are sorted into. Jati resembles the anthropological definition of caste and is what most Indians mean when they refer to it. In Indian English, the word “community” is also widely used to refer to caste in this sense and is taken to mean “a group that interacts economically with people outside of it [through specialized economic roles], but segregates itself socially through endogamy [which prevents people from marrying outsiders]....each [jati] is assigned a particular rank in the varna system, but strong and complicated endogamy rules prevent people from most jatis from mixing with each other, even if they are of the same varna level”[19]
There is a close association between Hinduism and varna and jati due to their millennia-long coevolution together in the Indian subcontinent, but the association is not absolute; one can be Hindu without caste, and caste exists in all non-Hindu communities. There are anywhere between 4,600 and 40,000 jati castes in India.[20] These groups were narrow and specific—it was not just that one was a Brahmin from Bengal (a region in eastern India and Bangladesh), or Sikh from Punjab (a region in northwestern India and eastern Pakistan). Rather, people would say that they were, for example, a Gaud Saraswat[21] Brahmin from the Konkan region of coastal Maharashtra, a coastal state in central India. This meant that an individual from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin caste would only marry within their small community within the Konkan region of Maharashtra, eat only foods permitted to their community, and serve in their traditional roles as administrators for local princes.
The ancient Hindu tradition of India prized open religious, metaphysical, and theological debate. Within Hinduism in particular, there is no consensus or orthodoxy on the nature of God or the gods, the material world, and salvation from the cycle of rebirths. In the two ancient Sanskrit epics, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, various sages, philosophers, warriors, and rishis all present multiple theological and ethical positions to kings without censorship and criticism, which presents a stark contrast to Medieval Europe.[22] Perhaps the Hindu tradition of open theological debate is a function of it being mostly an elite concern unrelated to power structures. Given the compartmentalization of Indian society into multiple communities, group rights and insults to individuals based on status or personal honor were a matter that ancient Indian states punished by law. Indians, from time immemorial, have felt the need to seek redress for insults. The Indian political tradition has often argued that authorities should intervene actively in society in order to preserve peace and harmony. The Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit epic, notes:
“If there were no king on earth for wielding the rod of chastisement, the strong would then have preyed on the weak after the manner of fishes in the water. It has been heard by us that men, in days of old, in consequence of anarchy, met with destruction, devouring one another like stronger fishes devouring the weaker ones in the water.”[23]
Evidence for this can be found in the Yājñavalkya Smṛti, a 3rd century CE Sanskrit text on law that was as influential in classical and medieval India as the Code of Justinian was in Europe. The text states that insulting a caste or group of people is a criminal offense that requires a fine: “for reviling a scholar of the triple Veda [Hindu text], the king, or a god, the punishment is the highest seizure-fine; for reviling a caste or association, the middle; and for reviling a village or region, the lowest. (215)”[24] Speech targeting people on the individual level is also subject to fines, adjusted to a person’s rank and status:
“If someone insults people who lack a limb or a sense organ or are sick, whether truthfully or untruthfully, or with phony praise, he should be fined thirteen and a half paṇas [ancient currency]. When a man abuses someone, saying: “You are a mother-fucker or a sister-fucker!” the king should make him pay a fine of twenty-five. The fine is halved when the abuse is directed at inferiors and doubled when directed at wives of others and at superior. The imposition of punishment should be carried out according to a person’s superiority or inferiority in terms of social class and caste. When reviling is done in the inverse order of social class, the fines for people of the lowest social class are increased by four, three, and two times, respectively. When it is done in the direct order of social class, those same fines are reduced progressively by one half.”[25]
Spreading information—whether true or false—that could lead to a loss of status within the eyes of the community was also proscribed: “when someone reviles another with regard to a sin causing loss of caste,[26] he is to be punished with the middle seizure-fine; with regards to a secondary sin causing loss of caste, however, he should be made to pay the lowest seizure-fine. (214).”[27] The English common law tradition of not requiring a plaintiff in a defamation case to prove falsehood thus fit in naturally with the Indian tradition. Threats were also subject to penalty, with the fines being greater for what the American legal tradition calls “true threats.”
“For saying that one would destroy a man’s arms, neck, eyes, or thighs, the fine is one hundred paṇas; half that amount if it is said with regard to the feet, nose, ears, and hands. When a man says it without the ability to carry it out, he should be fined ten paṇas, while a man who is capable of carrying it out should be forced to provide, in addition, a surety to insure the other’s safety.”[28]
Threats were seen as a challenge to both the social hierarchy and to public order in the ancient Indian tradition; the British legal system of the 19th century again built on the notion of maintaining hierarchy and order. Therefore, there were limits on expression during the classical Hindu period, though they were not necessarily ideological or theological. Nonetheless, people took their honor and status as individuals and as members of communities seriously, demanding legal recourse when insulted, threatened, or their caste called into question.
Much of the northern portion of the Indian subcontinent was conquered by Turkic and Afghan Muslims at the start of the 13th century, leading to the creation of the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526 CE) and the subsequent Mughal Empire (1526-1858 CE), which ruled large parts of India. Islamic rule brought its own set of speech norms to the subcontinent. During the Mughal Empire, life went on as usual in the countless Indian villages, with local custom and religious learning functioning as law for most aspects of life, administrative and criminal issues being excepted.[29] For most daily matters, Hindus in villages and towns followed Hindu laws, often specific to their castes, and Muslims followed Islamic law (sharia), with village elders or Mughal officials adjudicating cases that involved multiple communities and customs.
The Sunni Muslim Mughal Dynasty was often tolerant toward its mostly Hindu subjects, and many emperors such as Akbar (reigned 1556-1605 CE) continued the ancient Indian tradition of theological debate in an attempt to discern the reality of metaphysical matters.[30] Akbar established a hall in which members of various religions could debate; ultimately, he started his own short-lived religion. Other emperors were intolerant and restricted speech on religious issues in high profile cases that challenged Sunni orthodoxy. For example, the Shia cleric Qazi Nurullah Shustari was executed as a heretic in 1610 CE on the basis of a book he wrote.[31] Additionally, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (reigned 1658-170 CE) executed the ninth Guru of Sikhism, Tegh Bahadur in 1675 for refusing to convert to Islam.[32] There is a basis in various interpretations of traditional Islamic law for punishments for blasphemy and heresy, under the theory that the Islamic community is a nation (ummah) and that denial of that nation’s premises (“there is no god but God and Muhammad is His Prophet”) amounts to a security threat and is therefore treason.[33]Aurangzeb was an orthodox Sunni Muslim who persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, and Shias: much of the contemporary Hindu nationalist movement uses his reign as a reference point for pushing against laws perceived as being overly protective of Muslim sentiments. However, on the whole, these issues impacted nobles and townspeople more than villagers, who lived as they did for millennia, with very little interaction with the formal apparatus of the status, except to pay taxes.[34]
THE BRITISH RAJ
In 1757 CE, the British East India Company, a trading outfit based in London, began its involvement in local Indian politics just as the Mughal state was beginning to fragment into autonomous entities. This soon led to the Company’s conquest of large parts of the Indian subcontinent.[35] In 1858 CE, the British government assumed direct rule over India from the Company, initiating the Indian Empire, better known by its informal name, the British Raj (raj meaning rule in Hindi). This Indian Empire was jurisdictionally and legally separate from the United Kingdom, though it was run by the British.[36] The legal system of the Raj was a hodge-podge of English common law, codified European-style civil law, Hindu law, and Islamic law dating from the Mughal era (the Company was legally a mere deputy of the Mughal Emperor until the 1830s, and often had to work within the contours of the existing legal system in India).[37] The modern Republic of India has inherited the British legal system, common law precedents, and codes, so there is direct legal continuity between the British Raj and modern India.
At its height, the British Raj ruled over a population comprising at least two dozen major ethnic and linguistic groups. Hindus were the majority of the British Raj’s population, at around 70 percent, while Muslims were a quarter of its people, and other religions, the rest.[38] As a colonial power ruling over 350 million people in a multiethnic, multiconfessional entity by 1947—the year of India’s independence—maintaining security, control, and public order was the chief concern of the British Raj, and its laws governing speech reflected this priority. In 1857, the Indian soldiers (“sepoys”) who comprised the majority of the East India Company’s army mutinied, sparking a rebellion that lasted over a year and led to the British crown’s assumption of direct control over India. Soon afterward, the Indian Penal Code was passed in 1860, and is still in force today.[39] While family law and civil matters remained governed by English common law or Hindu and Islamic laws, the Penal Code was based on a codification of English criminal law, along with elements of the French Code Napoléon and Edward Livingston’s 1824 code for Louisiana.[40] The Penal Code was conceptualized so as to standardize criminal law across a large and hitherto heterogenous legal system spanning different cultures. In particular, the Penal Code criminalized incitement, sedition, defamation, and the promotion of disharmony between religions: all designed to protect the security of the state, its officers, and public order, rather than to cater to individual rights. In addition to the Penal Code, the British government also attempted several times to directly stifle criticism in the press. First, it passed the Vernacular Press Act, 1878, which gave the government the power to censor non-English language press. The Act was quickly withdrawn in 1881 after heavy criticism.[41] In 1908 and 1910, the Raj government tried again by passing the Newspaper (Incitement to Offence) Act and the Indian Press Act. These acts gave magistrates the power to confiscate press property likely to incite violence and the power to deregister anti-government papers. Both were repealed in 1921.[42]
The British Indian Empire, 1909. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Sedition: Section 124A
The original penal code was amended in 1870 to add Section 124A, which provided for punishment for sedition against the British Raj and was used as an instrument by which the colonial British authorities could retain control over India. The section, as added in 1870 defined sedition as “exciting or attempting to excite feelings of disaffection to the Government established by law.”[43] It was further amended in 1898 to make punishable “bringing or attempting to bring in hatred or contempt towards the Government,” a clause which is still in effect today.[44] The Penal Code’s sedition clauses were upheld—and qualified by several court cases—during the Raj. One of the first cases was Queen-Empress v. Jogendra Chunder Bose & Ors., (1892) ILR 19 Cal 35[45] in which the Calcutta High Court established two important precedents. First, it held that the publishers of seditious material were not “absolved of legal liability simply because they had not written…seditious content” that criticized the British government.[46] This established the precedent in India that publishers can indeed be held liable for the content they publish. This includes some online intermediaries today, those that publish news and current events. These types of intermediaries can be held liable for user-generated content, according to Section 79(2)(c) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.[47] Second, Jogendra Chunder Bose & Ors. held that there is a distinction between legitimate criticism of the government—disapprobation—and non-legitimate criticism of the government—disaffection: “a person may freely say what he pleases about any Government measure or any public man as long as it is consistent with a disposition to render obedience to the lawful authority of Government. In connection with this subject Sir J. Stephen has clearly said that the freedom of the press would not be curtailed so long as the principle above laid down was adhered to.”[48] The court “concluded that since only disaffection is penalized, the offense of sedition does not take people’s rights away.” The division between lawful and unlawful, dangerous speech persists today in India, along with the notion that the existence of a category of unlawful speech does not curtail civil liberties, if narrowly drawn.
Incitement and Communal Harmony: Section 153A
With the spread of mass media and modern transportation, all within a single state, British India, larger group identities also began to consolidate, as they did in Europe. While individuals still identified with their local castes and communities, they also began to see themselves as part of larger, more-abstract linguistic or religious groups such as “Bengalis” or “Hindus.” Communal violence, a euphemism for riots between Hindus and Muslims began to increase throughout the course of the 19th century during the Raj.[49] This necessitated the inclusion of Section 153 of the Penal Code, which made penalized “whoever malignantly, or wantonly, by doing anything which is illegal, gives provocation to any person intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation will cause the offence of rioting to be committed.”[50] More importantly, because the British Raj was a tinderbox of communal tensions, Section 153A was enacted to prescribe a fine for whoever “promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities.”[51] Modern Indian case law has held that this section is still good law, although it would need to be shown that the defendant had mens rea: such disharmony would need to be “perpetrated with the deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of that class.”[52]
Defamation: Section 295A
Sedition and public order were not the only limits to expression in the British Raj. Another of the Indian Penal Code criminalized defamation, Section 499.[53] As demonstrated earlier, defamation has a long history in the Indian context, and is often tied to perceptions of power within a social hierarchy. The defamation law in the British Raj was harsher than in Britain itself, because in India, there was criminal liability for both oral slander and written libel, perhaps influenced by the ancient Indian notion that even a rumor could cause one to lose one’s caste or ritual status, or in the case of women, their honor in the eyes of the community.[54] In a case, a local court noted the “gravity with which the local population regard an affront to a man’s dignity and honour.”[55] Defamation in the colonial context was also certainly influenced by the colonial’s state’s need to preserve the honor and reputation of its officials.[56]
The criminal prohibition of defamatory-like statements applies not only to individuals, but more importantly, to groups, with the purpose of promoting public order, although this required an amendment to the original penal code.[57] In 1927, after years of tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the province of Punjab, a Hindu anonymously published a book entitled Rangila Rasul (Hindi-Urdu for “Colorful Prophet”). This book contained passages considered derogatory toward the Prophet Muhammad. In response to riots which followed the acquittal of the book’s publisher—because there were no laws against insulting religion or religious figures—the British amended the Indian Penal Code to add Section 295A which states:
“Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens of India, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.”[58]
This law is still on the books, although later case law has added nuance to its provisions. Under this law, or other laws, books and movies that offend religious sensibilities are often banned, such as Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.[59] As with other sections of India’s Penal Code, Section 295A also applies to the conduct of Indian citizens online because the provisions of Indian law apply to the online sphere unless they are specifically shielded against this by the Information Technology Act of 2000.[60] Ultimately, the acquitted Hindu publisher of Rangila Rasul was murdered by a Muslim in 1929, sparking further tensions.[61] In modern Indian law, Section 295A along with Section 295, which prohibits defiling places of worship of any religion, are often used to protect group honor. This also allows groups to file defamation and Section 295A cases not only on behalf of people, but on behalf of specific deities in Hinduism, or other holy artifacts, such as the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. These holy objects are juristic persons, provided they are consecrated, and possess most of the same rights as natural people.[62]
The persistence of the British penal code, with its sedition and defamation clauses, is often portrayed by Indian activists as a colonial imposition on an otherwise free society, but this framing is unfair; after all, Indians today maintain and frequently use the code to settle scores and avenge insults, often with glee. Indians have been bristling at insults for three millennia across caste, creed, and religion, and in a culture where honor and public perception matter immensely, insults and perceived insults demand satisfaction.
MODERN INDIA
British India became independent—and was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—on August 15, 1947. The Indian legal system was not created de novo. As the legal successor of the British Raj, India inherited, and kept, the preexisting legal system it was born with. The Indian Penal Code of 1860, with its clauses pertaining to speech, remain in force today, but in the context of a new constitutional framework that strikes a balance between freedom of expression and the censorship of seditions, defamatory, and disorderly speech.
Soon after independence, a Constituent Assembly of India was set up, which passed a new constitution in November 1949. On January 26, 1950, the current Constitution of India went into effect and Bhārat Gaṇarājya, the Republic of India was born. The Indian constitution is a particularly important document because it is the bridge between older, Western constitutions—which were heavily referenced during the Constituent Assembly debates—and later, post-colonial constitutions.[63]
Article 19 & The First Amendment
Article 19 of the Indian constitution provided for freedom of speech and expression.[64] Like other articles of the Indian constitution, the longest in the world, it laid out the various conditions for and restrictions of free expression in quite some detail. Initially, the framers of India’s constitution’s vision for free speech was fairly expansive. However, within the first year of the Constitution’s operationality, the government introduced the first amendment; ironically, the purpose of the first amendment to the Indian constitution is in the opposite spirit to the U.S. first amendment. The original Article 19(2) read:
“Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law in so far as it relates to, or prevent the State from making any law relating to, libel, slander, defamation, contempt of Court or any matter which offends against decency or morality or which undermines the security of, or tends to overthrow, the State.”[65]
On the other hand, today’s amended Article 19(2) reads:
“Nothing in sub clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”[66]
Under the original Article 19, before the first amendment was passed, the Indian courts began to invalidate many laws providing for public safety and order, which India inherited from the Raj on both the local and union levels—India is a federal state). In Tara Singh Gopi Chand vs The State on 28 November, 1950, the Punjab-Haryana High Court declared that the sedition clause of the Penal Code, “Section 124A, Penal Code, has become void as contravening the right of freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by Article 19 of the constitution.”[67] In another case, Romesh Thappar vs The State Of Madras on 26 May, 1950, the newly convened Supreme Court of India interpreted the Article 19 prohibition on that “which undermines the security of, or tends to overthrow…the State” narrowly to mean a prohibition on “nothing less than endangering the foundations of the State or threatening its overthrow.”[68] The plaintiff, Romesh Thappar wanted to circulate a left-wing weekly, but was banned from doing so by provincial authorities in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu) because Thappar was a known Marxist and the magazine was thought to pose a threat to public order.[69] The court in Romesh Thappar ruled that “relatively minor breaches of the peace of a purely local significance” were not threats to the security of the state.[70]
This proved to be too close to American First Amendment jurisprudence and was at odds with the vision that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, a Cambridge-educated liberal and Fabian (gradualist) socialist, had for the nascent Indian state. Prime Minister Nehru wanted to use the power of the state to create a democratic yet bureaucratic, centralized nation with a planned economy. Furthermore, he wanted to use the power of the state for the modernization of society, such as updating India’s marriage laws, breaking up the large holdings of zamindars (landlords), and abolishing—legally—the caste system. Nehru believed that this vision would be difficult to implement if the courts got in his way, whether to enforce property rights, or to allow opposition to his plans, particularly from the far-left and far-right. Soon after Romesh Thappar, the Nehru government proposed the first amendment to the Indian constitution in order to give the government more powers. During the parliamentary debates on the amendment, Nehru said: “because we live in these rapidly changing times, we cannot wait for this slow process [of judicial interpretation].”[71] Nehru also admitted that “if all our schemes are stopped—maybe rightly stopped, maybe due to a correct interpretation of the law…then you, I and the country have to wait with social and economic conditions—social and economic upheavals—and we are responsible for them.”[72]
During arguments on the amendment in 1951, Nehru, going back to the tradition of Jogendra Chunder Bose & Ors. (1892), made the argument that there was a distinction to be made between “responsible” and “less responsible” speech, and that the latter should be restricted in a country like India.[73] The need to amend Article 19 in order to restrict “less responsible” expression in the interests of public order was laid out by Nehru in a statement of objectives for the first amendment on May 10, 1951: “the citizen's right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by article 19(1)(a) has been held by some courts to be so comprehensive as not to render a person culpable even if he advocates murder and other crimes of violence. In other countries with written constitutions, freedom of speech and of the press is not regarded as debarring the State from punishing or preventing abuse of this freedom.”[74] Nehru was particularly concerned with threats to public order from organized far-left and far-right “communal” elements within India. In a letter, he wrote that:
“I have no doubt that the Communist Party have been guilty of atrocious crimes and that we have to deal with it as such. Nevertheless, I feel that certain communal elements in India are far more dangerous to our unity and to any progress that we might hope to make, than the Communists.”[75]
This view was widely shared by other prominent Indian politicians and post-independence leaders, leading to the passage of the first amendment in June 1951: even the most libertarian members of parliament believed that a multicultural, unwieldy country like India needed restrictions on expression in the interests of public order.[76] After all, the recent partition of India on religious lines had led to the displacement of up to 15 million people and the deaths of 2 million.[77] Thus, ultimately, the first amendment created a new Article 19, which provides for a framework of free speech within the limits that the modern Indian state inherited from both its ancient history and the British Raj: public order, national security, communal harmony and honor.
This decision of the Indian state is not merely a reflection of a top-down, elite need for autocratic control. Rather, it is a reflection of the realities and mores of Indian society, which cannot be said to be particularly open-minded, despite the constitution of the Indian state as a liberal democracy.[78] According to Pew research, India has the highest score of religious social hostilities of all countries surveyed.[79] There have been communal incidents in India every year since its independence, and 58 major communal riots—where over 100 people died—since 1967.[80] Between 1950 and 1995, there were 1194 incidents of communal violence in India.[81] In addition to religious violence, there is endemic caste and sexual violence in India, often spurred by rumors—speech—and encouraged by village elders and leaders.[82],[83] It is in this context that the Indian government maintained laws designed to reign in speech deemed to cause public disorder. On top of that, petitioners in India love to use or misuse Section 295A, which is frequently cited in cases filed against those who hurt religious “sentiments.”[84] In 2020, a citizen in the state of Madhya Pradesh filed a case against two Netflix executives under Section 295A of the penal code “for certain kissing scenes featured in the web series ‘A Suitable Boy’ which allegedly hurt religious sentiments as they were shot in a temple premise.”[85] Section 295A allows any citizen to lodge a complaint because it allows for a private right of action.[86] If reformers want to reduce the amount of frivolous litigation, they should seek to amend the part of Section 295A that allows anyone to lodge a complaint, and instead leave that decision with the courts or police.
Public Order: The Direct and Proximate Nexus Test
After the passage of the first amendment, the Indian courts continued to interpret Article 19, and a body of case law emerged that defined its parameters. The Indian courts have tended to read Article 19 fairly liberally due to the tendency of Indian governments—of all major parties and ideological viewpoints—to view Article 19 as giving them expansive powers to restrict expression. Nonetheless, Indian courts have upheld the continued use of colonial-era sedition, defamation, and public order laws as being consistent with Article 19 and the needs of Indian society. The Supreme Court of India serves a function similar to that of the U.S. Supreme Court: as the highest court of India, it can review decisions for their constitutionality, and issues binding precedents.
In one of the first post-first amendment cases, Ramji Lal Modi vs State of UP (1957), the petitioner challenged Section 295A of the penal code, which criminalized insulting religious beliefs. He was accused of insulting Muslims by the state government of Uttar Pradesh in the course of the publication of a magazine devoted to cow protection (Hindus traditionally do not kill or consume cows, whereas the consumption of beef is permitted in Islam). Ramji Lal Modi argued that the Article 19(2) language allowing restrictions on speech “in the interests of public order” were valid “only if the likelihood of public disorder is made an ingredient of the offence and the prevention of public disorder is a matter of proximate and not remote consideration.”[87] However, the Supreme Court of India held that this argument did not hold water because “the calculated tendency of this aggravated form of insult is clearly to disrupt the public order and the section, which penalises such activities, is well within the protection of cl. (2) of Art. 19 as being a law imposing reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by Art. 19(1)(a).”[88]
The Supreme Court, however, ruled differently in a similar case just three years later. In Superintendent, Central Prison vs Ram Manohar Lohia (1960), Ram Manohar Lohia, the General Secretary of the Socialist Party of India, was arrested for instigating farms by urging them not to pay an increased tax for irrigation.[89] This time, the court found that if the “restriction [to speech] has no proximate relationship to the achievement of public order, it cannot be said that the restriction is a reasonable restriction.”[90] However, it should be noted that Ram Manohar Lohia did not involve a religious or caste-related issue, fear of which haunts Indian governments more than tax issues, and this may be the cause of two such different rulings in quick succession.
That being said, subsequent cases still upheld the proximate nexus test, such as Arup Bhuyan vs State of Assam (2011), which permitted membership in banned associations unless the individual was responsible for incitement to imminent violence.[91] The most eloquent framing of this standard, however, involves a case touching upon caste, demonstrating that the Indian court system has gradually been willing to extend that standard to even controversial topics, the type that could sometimes cause public disorder. In S. Rangarajan vs P. Jagjivan Ram (1989), a suit was brought against a film producer for making a Tamil (a language in southern India) movie deemed to have insulted the Brahmin caste. The Court wrote that:
“There does indeed have to be a compromise between the interest of freedom of expression and social interests. But we cannot simply balance the two interests as if they are of equal weight. Our commitment to freedom of expression demands that it cannot be suppressed unless the situations created by allowing the freedom are pressing and the community interest is endangered. The anticipated danger should not be remote, conjectural or far fetched. It should have a proximate and direct nexus with the expression. The expression of thought should be intrinsically dangerous to the public interest. In other words, the expression should be inseparably locked up with the action contemplated like the equivalent of a ‘spark in a powder keg.’”[92]
Despite the Court’s nuanced reading of the conditions that speech could be censored in some circumstances, especially when public order and national security were at stake, the Court also continued to uphold laws on defamation, disharmony, and sedition for similar reasons. In the seminal case Kedar Nath Singh vs State Of Bihar (1962), the constitutionality of sedition laws were upheld because restrictions on the freedom of speech were permissible when in the interests of public order and thus “lie within the ambit of permissible legislative restrictions.”[93] However, in a line of reasoning similar to the Supreme Court’s reading of 295A, the Court ruled here that the seditious conduct must rise to the level of inciting violence against the state.[94] Nonetheless, this has been elastically interpreted in modern India and the government and private citizens have filed sedition cases against journalists, activists, filmmakers, and others who have engaged in criticism of the state, its policies, or ethnic and religious groups in India.[95]
INDIA: ONLINE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The advent of the internet, whilst transformative in many ways, also reinforced many of India’s worries about national security, religious harmony, and public order. Hate speech, particularly that targeted at religious, ethnic, and caste communities—insults against a group under Section 153A of the penal code—has contributed to public disorder and rioting; in fact, the internet made it easier to spread such speech and trigger material violence. The internet can be used to quickly incite violence in a country with little digital literacy and highly charged communal tensions: “hate speech and misinformation propagated through platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp has resulted in mob violence, lynching, communal riots, and claimed many innocent lives in India.”[96] Police and local authorities in India “frequently attribute communal violence to the malicious effects of online hate speech.”[97] The application WhatsApp, popular for chatting in India, has been implicated in the spread of messages inciting mob violence;[98] individuals accused of sending the offending messages have been tried under Section 295A, which criminalizes speech that outrages communal feelings.[99] However the ubiquity of WhatsApp makes it difficult for the government to deal with every single case, which is why new rules were implemented in 2021 that put the onus on companies to enforce compliance with India’s laws.
The provisions of Indian Penal Code are applicable to the virtual world, and numerous individuals have been prosecuted under the provisions of the act for online activity. For example, multiple individuals have been charged with sedition under Section 124A of the code, often for pro-Pakistan posts.[100] This reflects the paranoia of the Indian state and Indian society toward perceived security threats. In 2000, the Indian parliament enacted the Information Technology (IT) Act, which is the primary legislation in India for the governance of the internet, cybercrime, and online commerce.[101] The act implicitly extends the Indian Penal Code’s provisions to the online sphere by providing for amendments to the code that clarify that its provisions regarding documents and evidence extend to the electronic realm.[102] More importantly, it supplements the penal code through its own various provisions, some of which reflect and replicate the language of the Indian Penal Code and Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution. Section 66F of the Information Technology Act states that:
“Whoever knowingly or intentionally penetrates or accesses a computer resource without authorisation or exceeding authorised access, and by means of such conduct obtains access to information…with reasons to believe that such information, data or computer database so obtained may be used to cause or likely to cause injury to the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence, or to the advantage of any foreign nation, group of individuals or otherwise, commits the offence of cyber terrorism.”[103]
Individuals have faced criminal prosecution under both the Indian Penal Code and the IT Act for similar offenses, but recently, the Bombay High Court, an appellate court, ruled that individuals could not be prosecuted for the same crime under both laws, because that violated laws on double jeopardy.[104]
One provision of the IT Act, 2000, has been struck down: Section 66A, which was added to the original IT Act in 2009 as an amendment.[105] Underscoring the fact that internet censorship is an issue supported by all parties and ideologies in India, Section 66A was added by the left-leaning Indian National Congress (INC), which governed India between 2004-2014 (the right-learning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) framed the original IT Rules in 2000). Section 66A penalized sending:
“[A]ny information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device; or any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance.”[106]
In 2015, the Supreme Court struck down this provision as unconstitutional in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India and ruled that it would have a chilling effect on speech, citing U.S. Justice Louis D. Brandeis’s dissent in Whitney v. California (1927) at length. The Court said that the speech penalized activity that “has no proximate connection with incitement to commit an offence” and that “the mere causing of annoyance, inconvenience, danger etc., or being grossly offensive or having a menacing character are not offences under the Penal Code at all.”[107]
Nonetheless, despite this ruling, freedom of speech on the internet in India continued to be restricted in various ways. The provisions of the Indian Penal Code continue to be applicable to crimes committed on the internet. Furthermore, the Indian government has banned popular Chinese applications such as TikTok, and has shut down the internet in entire regions. From August 2019 to February 2021, the Indian government shut down the internet in the territory of Jammu and Kashmir, citing the public security concern of preventing violent protests. The shutdown occurred under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code of 1973 which allows magistrates to prevent unlawful assembly in times of danger, a provision extended to “assembly” on the internet.[108] The order was challenged, and the Indian Supreme Court ruled in Anuradha Bhasin vs Union Of India on 10 January, 2020 that while the internet could be blocked, it could not be blocked indefinitely, and that any such order would have to be temporarily limited and satisfy tests of necessity and proportionality.[109] As in previous cases, the Supreme Court of India attempted to balance freedom of expression with concerns for public order.
The following sections detail some of the laws underlying online restrictions of speech in India.
Online Sedition
The internet makes it easier to register sedition and defamation cases against individuals whose actions would previously have been, at most, the subject of local gossip, and are not seditious in any sense under the Kedar Nath ruling, which stated the speech is only seditious when it incites violence. However, Kedar Nath did not clarify who decides whether speech is an incitement to violence.[110] As a result, magistrates and the police have frequently brought sedition charges against individuals for non-violent speech, much of which is speech supporting India’s “enemies” online.
For example, in 2021, three Muslim students in the state of Uttar Pradesh were charged with promoting disharmony between groups under Section 153A of the penal code, and sedition under Section 124A, after celebrating Pakistan’s victory against India in the cricket T20 World Cup match. Their views on the World Cup were made known to the public and government through social media posts.[111] In 2019, a chicken shop owner in the state of Karnataka posted a picture captioned “I stand with the Pakistan [Army]” on Facebook—apparently unaware of the words due to his illiteracy in English—and was arrested by local police within 20 minutes.[112] (It is unclear how the police acted so swiftly, but it is likely he was reported by neighbors.) Between 2010 and 2021, 102 cases were filed against 152 people for seditious content posted online, with either the police acting on their own initiative or upon the complaints of local citizens. The majority of this content was either directed against the ideology of whatever party was in power in a particular state, or perceived as being pro-Pakistan. However, the enforcement of these laws is selective and often seem to reflect the political or ideological needs of those in power. For example, Yati Narsinghanand, Hindu monk who publicly called for the genocide of Muslims in December 2021, was not arrested until January 2022 because of his close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).[113] Of the 152 people booked for seditious content online, 84 had posted on Facebook, 37 on WhatsApp, 32 on Twitter, and four on YouTube.[114] In the vast majority of these cases, the police did not involve the social media platforms, treating them as neutral intermediaries, but went straight for the individuals themselves. Yet the courts need not hear these cases, most of which are frivolous and fail to meet the standard set by the Supreme Court that seditious speech has to rise to the level of inciting violence that threatens the very foundations of the state. The courts ought to interpret sedition very narrowly, within the parameters laid out by the Supreme Court, instead of swaying to local, populist demands.
Despite numerous petitions, the Supreme Court has not struck down Section 124A, but has dismissed the sedition cases and merely reiterated the standard that seditious conduct must rise to the level of inciting violence against the state in order to be criminal.[115] Even if the Supreme Court struck down Section 124A, individuals would still be charged for seditious for spurious reasons because India’s legal landscape is characterized by several complementary laws; the provisions of the Indian Penal Code are similar to sections of other acts, such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, the Arms Act of 1959, and the National Security Act of 1980, all of which also allow the government to prosecute people for sedition.
Source: Karnataka Has More Sedition Cases Based On Social-Media Posts Than Any State. Most Are Illegal. 13 July 2021. Article 14.
IT Act, Section 69A: Banning TikTok
The Indian government has also banned the download and use of various internet applications, particularly those based in China. On June 29, 2020, the Indian government banned 59 Chinese applications including TikTok, WeChat, and others. These applications are now permanently banned in India.[116] The ban came after deadly clashes, which left over 50 people dead,[117] between Indian and Chinese forces over disputed territory on their Himalayan border.[118] The authority for this comes from Section 69A of the Information Technology Act which gives the government the power to block public access of information through computers in the following circumstance:
“Where the Central Government or any of its officers specially authorised by it in this behalf is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so to do, in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above….”[119]
In Shreya Singhal vs Union of India (2015), the same Court which struck down Article 66A of the IT Act upheld Article 69A because Article 69A had adequate procedural safeguards, which require the government to record the reasons for its decision in writing and conveyed to the appropriate agencies.[120]
TikTok, perhaps because it is a Chinese company, issued a statement after the ban reiterating its commitment to following local laws.[121] TikTok itself was not accused of violating any local content-based laws, but the application as a whole was deemed a national security threat by the Indian government because of its place of origin. Moreover, the Indian government saw banning TikTok as in the interest of its national security because doing so would hit the profitability of a Chinese company.[122] Ultimately, the national security rationale for banning TikTok in India made it difficult for any domestic constituency to argue against it, and the ban became permanent. However, Indian companies did not reap the benefits of this ban, as Instagram largely replaced TikTok.[123] Instagram’s Reels feature is particularly popular, and appeals to creators who previously used TikTok. By the fourth quarter of 2021, 39 percent of Instagram’s global downloads were from India.[124]
What is significant here is how the Indian government can play a significant role in the fortunes of global social media platforms due to its ability to ban or allow them due to national security. In the future, the Indian government could potentially use this power to promote domestic companies. India has shown that it is not averse to risking economic and political blowback when it comes to promoting what it perceives to be its own national interests, which could one day include promoting local social media companies over foreign ones. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, India did not take any economic actions against Russia, despite requests to do so from European countries; in fact, it expanded its imports of Russian oil despite the threat of sanctions.[125]
Recent Developments: Information Technology Rules, 2021
In May 2021, new rules—the Information Technology Rules, 2021—came into effect that take away the safe harbor granted to intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp if they fail to remove content that is illegal under Indian law.[126] This includes seditious, insulting, and defamatory content that is penalized under the Indian Penal Code.[127] These rules have come after years of debate over whether the internet ought to be more regulated in India, and in order to decrease the workload of India’s notoriously clogged courts; there are 44 million cases pending in the Indian courts as of 2021.[128] India’s 2021 rules seek to regulate the internet in a consistent fashion, instead of dealing with seditious and defamatory issues as they come up on a case-by-case basis.
Under Section 79(1) of the Information Technology Act of 2020, “an intermediary shall not be liable for any third party information, data, or communication link made available or hasted by him.”[129] While this seems a safe harbor from liability along the lines of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in the United States, Section 79(3) of IT Act states that subsection (1) the article shall not be applicable if the “the intermediary has conspired or abetted or aided or induced, whether by threats or promise or otherwise in the commission of the unlawful act” or “upon receiving actual knowledge, or on being notified by the appropriate Government or its agency that any information, data or communication link residing in or connected to a computer resource controlled by the intermediary is being used to commit the unlawful act….”[130]A failure by the intermediary to swiftly remove the offending content could lead to liability.[131] Section 87 of the IT Act gives the Indian government the right to make rules to carry out the provisions of the Act, including 79(3). It was under these clauses that the Indian government promulgated secondary legislation—the Information Technology Rules, 2021—to enforce the IT Act.
The 2021 rules mandate that the user agreements of intermediaries inform their users that they cannot:
“[H]ost, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share any information that…is defamatory, violates the privacy of others, is obscene, is harmful to children, violates any law, is “ethnically objectionable…communicates any information which is patently false or misleading…[or] threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence or prevents investigation of any offence or is insulting other nation.”[132]
The 2021 rules also evidence the Indian government’s movement away from toward conditional liability. Although the 2021 rules allow companies to regulate themselves in accordance with the guidelines that have been issued, they must also register with the “Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which is itself overseen by other government ministries, all of which provide ‘guidance’ to online platforms.”[133] While the Indian government works with various social media providers to implement the rules, it can also block objectionable material on its own in emergencies. A failure by an organization to comply with the rules would result in a loss of immunity.[134] “However, India’s regulatory regime is not as onerous as Germany’s, or the one being proposed in Britain, because it does not impose a centralized statutory regime on service providers, nor does it regulate them directly.”[135] Finally, the 2021 rules also require social media platforms to establish local offices and compliance officers to ensure compliance with the rules.[136] It should also be noted here that the 2021 rules do not preclude the police and courts from continuing to try individuals for violating India’s criminal laws online.
Unsurprisingly, public order, defamation, national security, and other offenses that were exempt from free speech protection by the Indian courts over the past seventy years all make an appearance in the 2021 rules. More surprising, however, is the decision to regulate false and misleading content; if challenged in the courts, the government will have to show whether there is a proximate nexus between violence and misleading information, or whether such a generalization is overbroad and would need to be subject to a test of proximity to violence on a case-by-case basis. It is likely that the rules prohibiting posting false information will be misused in a manner similar to the misuse of sedition laws, with the filing of numerous frivolous, local complaints.
The Indian government also clarified that these new rules apply only to platforms that are “significant social media intermediaries,” defined as firms with over five million users.[137] Predictably, social media platforms and journalists in India considered these expansive rules to be onerous. WhatsApp and Twitter went to court in India seeking to challenge the rules, with Twitter suggesting that the rules were a threat to free speech.[138] These complaints, however, were short-lived, and after a few months, without much argument, the companies began to comply with the law, perhaps after they were confronted by the vehement response of the Indian government.
Twitter’s statement drew a sharp rebuke from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which emphasized India’s right as a sovereign state and democracy to make its own rules and restrictions on acceptable speech:
“Protecting free speech in India is not the prerogative of only a private, for-profit, foreign entity like Twitter, but it is the commitment of the world’s largest democracy and its robust institutions…Twitter’s statement is an attempt to dictate its terms to the world’s largest democracy. Through its actions and deliberate defiance, Twitter seeks to undermine India’s legal system…Twitter needs to stop beating around the bush and comply with the laws of the land. Law making and policy formulations is the sole prerogative of the sovereign and Twitter is just a social media platform and it has no locus in dictating what India's legal policy framework should be.”[139]
The courts have not yet ruled against the 2021 rules, which remain in force, and the Indian government has continued to enforce compliance. Twitter was subsequently declared to be non-compliant with the 2021 rules in July 2021,[140] before reversing course later by August. Without an in-depth explanation, Twitter, no doubt spooked about the possibility of losing immunity, pledged to “fully comply” with India’s new regulations.[141] WhatsApp has persisted with its suit because it believes that India’s new rules will force it to violate the privacy of its users by forcing the “company to trace users’ encrypted messages.”[142]However, beyond this, WhatsApp and its parent company, Facebook, are also in compliance with the 2021 rules.[143]
While there is an obvious tension between the community standards of social media platforms and local laws, it is likely that local laws will prevail in the long run because companies will want to keep on doing business in various jurisdictions. In India, getting entangled in long and costly litigation is often not worth the costs to businesses, when compliance is cheaper. Furthermore, India has countless laws that it can use to take platforms to court for sedition, defamation, breaches of national security, and internet security. Non-compliance carries the risk of making one’s company a target for constant harassment by the government, with all the added costs that may have. The Indian government has also presented numerous legal arguments for its position, including its view that foreign companies do not have standing to sue for rights in the Indian judiciary under Article 19 of the constitution, which pertains to the rights of Indian citizens.[144]
ANALYSIS: LESSONS FROM INDIA FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM REGULATION
Free speech is essential for any democratic, popular government. To openly and rationally debate and discuss public and private matters is the hallmark of a free and open society. This author feels strongly about that, whilst also recognizing the need for culturally specific norms to be given their rightful place. Therefore, nation and culture specific restrictions on expression, if tightly drawn, may be reasonable if not too onerous. India’s government and much of its society are in fact held back from more intrusive forms of censorship by the courts and the constitution, itself the product of Indian lawyers who created strong institutions, but those that bent to what was perceived to be local conditions that necessitated limits on certain rights. The extension of India’s pre-internet speech norms to the age of the internet is the logical consequence of extrapolating the mores of a society and political culture into the online realm. This culture allows the restriction of speech for various reasons, including on social media platforms.
At the same time, India’s proactive courts and interest groups have allowed it to strike a balance between security and freedom, a balance that may seem counterintuitive to the Americans who created many modern social media platforms, being raised in a culture that holds sacred Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”[145] But in much of the world, this is a false dichotomy, and in that respect, India resembles many other countries that are characterized by ethnic and tribal tensions that can quickly alight into a destructive situation. In India, communal riots and caste and religious violence are often incited by opportunistic individuals using social media; riots ensue, property is destroyed, people are killed in brutal street violence, sometimes hacked to death with machetes, or burned alive after being doused with petroleum and set aflame.
Unlike the United States, most countries also do not have the luxury of a peaceful geopolitical environment with benign neighbors, but must look to their own security closely, including speech that could undermine national security. India has clashed with and fought wars against two of its neighbors, Pakistan and China, and continues to engage in border skirmishes with those countries. This then is the context for which a country like India wishes to regulate social media platforms, even though there are also many cases in which such regulation is misused. Just like India, other countries have their own situations that necessitate local and context-specific regulations.
Nonetheless, there are some, however, who hold that social media platforms should develop homogenous international norms based primarily on European regulations. This view seems popular among South Asian activists who see it as a way to push back against government censorship and overzealous social norms, while also protecting the rights of minorities from hate speech.[146] However, this position is the converse of that taken by India, Pakistan, and many other Asian and African countries, insofar that most non-religious hate speech is permitted whereas speech the bar for banning seditious speech and speech threatening the nation is much lower. In this sense, European and Asian or “global south” values are at odds with each other.
Regardless of where the qualms social media companies may have about following local rules come from, there is a net benefit in doing so. This assuages the suspicions local actors have of social media platforms being vehicles for the foreign policy of the United States or other Western countries. It also lets local actors remain in control over the regulation of the internet in their countries, something which cannot be said of an alternative solution for neutral rulemaking for platforms, such as Facebook’s Oversight Board. The Facebook Oversight board has two issues: first, its independence is questionable, because ultimately Facebook can choose to accept or disregard its decisions,[147] and second, it is populated by individuals who by the very nature of their familiarity with global norms, may not be as aligned with the average political and cultural values of many countries. This is not a critique of cosmopolitanism, but an acknowledgement that the thinkers, scholars, and activists familiar with global internet norms are unlikely to be familiar with, let alone identify with the average beliefs of the populations of a country like India, which is over two-thirds rural. Therefore, there is bound to be a divergence between the norms of the average Indian and the norms of the Facebook Oversight Board, which does have one Indian member, a constitutional scholar and activist named Sudhir Krishnaswamy.[148] A truly reflective oversight board should have multiple individuals from across the political spectrum in each country the platform is in.
The global alternative is a “splinternet,” or the national division of cyberspace, as exemplified by China, which has walled off parts of its internet from the rest of the world.[149] However, a global splinternet can be mitigated if social media companies make concessions to local laws and regulations, because this would yield only a partial splinternet. Unlike in China, all of India’s major social media platforms are American, enabling connectivity and discourse between Indians and the rest of the world. Even if social media companies have to change their rules and show or not show different content in markets as disparate as the United States, Europe, and India, the majority of people would still be able to share the majority of content across international borders as long as social media companies can operate in multiple countries. This possibility, however, is totally precluded in the case of China.
As India demonstrated with its ban of TikTok, it has no problem blocking a platform in its entirety. The people of India are very prickly about being dictated to by Western governments or companies, and the Indian government’s regulation of social media platforms is very popular. Most Indians—and certainly the Indian government—see India as a great power,[150] a nation that deserves to create its own destiny after centuries of colonialism.[151] Moreover, many Indians believe that the United States took Pakistan’s side over India’s during the Cold War, while the Soviet Union helped India against Pakistan and China.[152] The aggregate result of these beliefs is the view that India should do whatever it thinks is best for it without the input or commentary of foreign governments or corporations. The values of sovereignty and national security trump values such as free trade; this may be understandable, after all, in a country that was colonized by a large, foreign, monopolistic corporation, the British East India Company.
India’s power and clout are continuing to grow. Companies operating in China go out of their way to comply with Chinese laws and restrictions, so it seems likely that as India becomes richer and stronger, companies will act similarly in order to maintain access to India’s large market. India’s online market will likely be the largest in the world soon, as more people go online and as India’s population surpasses China’s, something that may happen as soon as next year (2023).[153] As an independent player in global affairs, India is increasingly charting its own course on foreign policy, economics, and values, taking a page from China’s book. It follows then that India, as well as other countries in the “global south” will ask social media platforms to abide by local rules and regulations.
Social media platforms and other multinational corporations already tailor their policies in order to comply with European and Chinese law. Companies like Facebook have generally been more responsive to European concerns because of the economic and political clout of the European Union, which is much greater than, say, South Africa’s.[154] This sets the stage for the extension of the principle of compliance with local laws, which may mean different things in different jurisdictions. In the United States, this may mean adapting First Amendment case law to social media platforms by treating them as public forums, with the exception of private groups and spaces with limited membership. In Germany, this may mean compliance with the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, and in India it may mean compliance with the 2021 rules in combination with India’s Article 19 case law. In all scenarios, local laws take precedence over the community standards. In order to mitigate the costs of these policies for platforms, countries can take a leaf out of India’s book and apply these standards only to large platforms, such as those with over five million users.
CONCLUSION
The world is changing, as the nations of the global south—and their speech norms—gain more traction internationally. Even amongst Western countries, there are major differences between European and American norms; and within the United States, there are also many schools of thought about the extent of permissible speech on online platforms. There is therefore a plethora of views, across different countries, on how to regulate expression on the internet.
This paper argues that there is a connection between the norms of a society and the laws and regulations that society will implement in relation to free expression, both online and offline. These norms are often determined by cultural and historical contexts that are unique to each society. As such, it would be difficult to establish a global consensus on free speech norms.
This paper focused on India in particular and explored how India’s multiethnic nature, and history of group and religious conflict led to norms that valued honor and group harmony on one hand, and security on the other hand. India is an important example because many other countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America share characteristics with India: a concern for security, ethnic harmony, and the preservation of local social norms. This is in contrast to European speech norms, which tend to focus on protecting individual human rights. India is also especially important because it has the world’s largest population of internet users outside of China—where many social media platforms are banned—and is a liberal, electoral democracy that seeks to uphold freedom of speech within a framework emphasizing public order. India’s laws and actions will therefore be carefully observed as potential models by other countries.
As India has become stronger and more assertive, it has begun to demand that social media companies cleave to its laws and regulations, which put an emphasis on group harmony, national security, and preventing religious conflict, values that the Indian state and society deem more important that an expansive, American-style view of free speech. While Indian standards may not seem ideal from the Western perspective, social media companies should still follow them. If social media companies adapt to local laws and regulations, they can continue to operate fairly independently, and will provide a forum for users throughout the world to use the internet in a relatively free manner.
While less, rather than more, restrictions of speech are desirable online, the reality of the world is such that social media platforms and internet providers will have to adapt to local rules if they want to continue to operate in multiple jurisdictions. This is not merely a corporate strategy but a strategy to keep as many people as possible connected with each other throughout the world. If online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others are flexible in adapting to local demands, they are less likely to face legal trouble or risk being shut out of various jurisdictions. It is ultimately better for these platforms to operate with local restrictions throughout the world than to risk being banned.
Social media platforms should comply with local norms and laws for two reasons, both of which are good. First, it demonstrates respect for vastly different cultures; a one-size fits all approach to online content management will not work in a diverse world. Second, such compliance is the best way to continue to advance free expression, particularly when the alternative is facing the wrath of governments who can harass, sue, or ban social media platforms.
In conclusion: the example of India’s free speech norms and online content management is instructive for other countries and for social media companies seeking to fashion policies for other jurisdictions that have their own particular local customs, laws, and norms.
[1] Sadanand Dhume, “India May Face a Population Implosion,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2021. Some demographers believe that India has already overtaken China to become the world’s most populous country.
[2] Kantar Group, (“Internet Adoption in India, Kantar Media Group, June 2021), 2.
[3] Ibid.
[4] “Kantar Group, 8.
[5] “536 million users to log onto Internet in Indian languages by 2021,” Economic Times, April 30, 2017.
[6] Prasanto K. Roy, “Mobile data: Why India has the world's cheapest,” BBC News, March 18, 2019.
[7] Yasmin Ahmed, “WhatsApp may soon touch 500 million users in India despite new privacy policy, claims report,” India Today, January 12, 2021.
[8] Manish Singh, “YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India,” TechCrunch, January 11, 2021.
[9] Chaitra Anand, “The 10 countries with the most Facebook users: Is Australia among them?,” Yahoo Finance, November 9, 2021.
[10] Stacey McLachlan, “35 Instagram Stats That Matter to Marketers in 2022,” Hootsuite, January 18, 2022.
[11] Manish Singh, “TikTok goes down in India, its biggest overseas market,” TechCrunch, June, 30, 2020.
[12] Eric Bellman, “Is There Life After a TikTok Ban? A Nation Goes Into Withdrawal,” Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2020.
[13] Kai Schultz and Sameer Yasir, “India Restores Some Internet Access in Kashmir After Long Shutdown,” The New York Times, January 26, 2020.
[14] Shannon Bond and Bobby Allyn, “Russia is restricting social media. Here's what we know,” NPR, March 21, 2022.
[15] “TikTok Ban Lifted by Pakistan, Fourth Time in Past 15 Months,” NDTV Gadgets 360, November 22, 2021.
[16] Plato, Apology.
[17] David Reich, (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), Location 2724.
[18] Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “Where Did Indians Come From, Part 3: What Is Caste?,” The Diplomat Magazine, January 14, 2019.
[19] Reich, Ibid.
[20] Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “Where Did Indians Come From, Part 3: What Is Caste?,” The Diplomat Magazine, January 14, 2019.
[21] These terms indicate various subgroups and lineages amongst Brahmins.
[22] The Mahabharata, The Ramayana.
[23] Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation of The Mahabharata, Shanti Parva, Chapter 67, Sacred-Texts.com.
[24] Patrick Olivelle, A Treatise on Dharma by Yājñavalkya (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 184.
[25] Olivelle, 183-184.
[26] Conducting certain activities causes one to lose their caste status, effectively excommunicating them from their caste group and from society.
[27] Olivelle,183-184.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “The Evolution of Law and Administration in India: Ancient, Medieval, And Modern,” Akhi Pillalamarri’s Substack, April 2021. (This is a thesis prepared for an upper-level writing course at The George Washington University Law School.)
[30] Abraham Eraly, The Mughal Throne (London: Phoenix Books, 2000), Chapter 6.
[31] Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 109.
[32] J. S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 71-73.
[33] Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Shari'ah Law: An Introduction (Iran: Oneworld Publications, 2008), 220.
[34] Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Chapter 6.
[35] William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 49, 251.
[36] Stephen Legg, “An International Anomaly? Sovereignty, the League of Nations and India's Princely Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography, Volume 43 (2014), 99-100.
[37] Thomas Babington Macaulay, Government of India (Glasgow: Good Press, 1833), 30-32; Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, 399.
[38] Chandrika Kaul, “From Empire to Independence: The British Raj in India 1858-1947,” BBC History, March 3, 2011.
[39] Tamar Herzog, A Short History of European Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 221.
[40] Atul Chandra Patra, “An Historical Introduction to the Indian Penal Code,” Journal of the Indian Law Institute (Vol. 3, No. 3, July-Sept., 1961), 361.
[41] Uma Das Gupta, “The Indian Press 1870-1880: A Small World of Journalism,” Modern Asian Studies, (Cambridge University Press, Volume 11, Issue 2 , April 1977), 222.
[42] V. Venkatraman, “The Indian Press Act of 1910: The Press and Public Opinion at Crossroads in the Madras Presidency, 1910 – 1922,” SSRN, November 6, 2020.
[43] “Consultation Paper on Sedition,” Law Commission of India, 10.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Queen-Empress vs Jogendra Chunder Bose And Ors., Indian Kanoon, August 25, 1891.
[46] Avinash Kumar Yadav and Amartya Vikram Singh, “Decoding the history of Sedition law in India,” The Leaflet, June 8, 2021.
[47] Raghav Ahooja, “Rethinking India's intermediary liability regime: The advent of intermediary-turned-publishers,” Law and Other Things, October 23, 2021.
[48] Queen-Empress vs Jogendra Chunder Bose And Ors., Indian Kanoon, August 25, 1891.
[49] Bashabi Fraser, Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter, (United Kingdom: Anthem Press, 2008), 7–11.
[50] “Section 153 in The Indian Penal Code,” Indian Kanoon.
[51] “Section 153A in The Indian Penal Code,” Indian Kanoon.
[52] Ramji Lal Modi vs The State Of UP, Indian Kanoon, April 5, 1957.
[53] Defamation is also a civil tort in India.
[54] R. Knox-Mawer, “Defamation: Some Indian Precedents and the Common Law,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1956): 282–85, 284.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Yusra Khatoon and Avinash Ray, “Critical Analysis of Evolution and Legality of Defamation in India, MyLawman Socio Legal Review (Nov 25, 2020), 3.
[57] Thomas D. Jones, “Group Defamation under British, Canadian, Indian and Nigerian Law,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 5, no. 3 (1997): 281–335.
[58] Section 295A in The Indian Penal Code, Indian Kanoon.
[59] Padmaja Joshi, “Reading 'The Satanic Verses' not a punishable offence, say legal experts,” India Today, January 24, 2012.
[60] Vinod Joseph and Deeya Ray, “India: Cyber Crimes Under The IPC And IT Act - An Uneasy Co-Existence,” Mondaq, February 10, 2020.
[61] “From 'Rangila Rasul' to 'Padmavati',” Mint, November 21, 2017.
[62] Yashee, “The Lord as a juristic person: What legal rights do deities enjoy?,” The Indian Express, October 4, 2019.
[63] Akhilesh Pillalamarri and Cody Stanley, “Online Content Regulation: An International Comparison,” International Law and Policy Brief at GW Law, December 8, 2021.
[64] “Article 19 in The Constitution of India 1949,” Indian Kanoon.
[65] Arudra Burra, “Freedom of Speech in the Early Constitution: A study of the Constitution (First Amendment) Bill,” in The Indian Constituent Assembly (New York: Routledge, 2018), 130-131.
[66] “Article 19 in The Constitution of India 1949,” Indian Kanoon.
[67] Tara Singh Gopi Chand vs The State, Indian Kanoon, November 28, 1950.
[68] Romesh Thappar vs The State of Madras, Indian Kanoon, May 26, 1950.
[69] Bastian Steuwer, “The shadow of the First Amendment,” The Caravan, April 29, 2021.
[70] Romesh Thappar vs The State of Madras, Indian Kanoon, May 26, 1950.
[71] Tripurdaman Singh, “How Jawaharlal Nehru Shaped A Young Indian State's Ideas On 'Dissent',” Swarajya, September 9, 2018.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Arudra Burra, “Freedom of Speech in the Early Constitution: A study of the Constitution (First Amendment) Bill,” in The Indian Constituent Assembly (New York: Routledge, 2018), 141.
[74] “The Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951,” Ministry of Law and Justice, India.
[75] Arudra Burra, “Freedom of Speech in the Early Constitution: A study of the Constitution (First Amendment) Bill,” in The Indian Constituent Assembly (New York: Routledge, 2018), 139.
[76] Arudra Burra, “Freedom of Speech in the Early Constitution: A study of the Constitution (First Amendment) Bill,” in The Indian Constituent Assembly (New York: Routledge, 2018), 153.
[77] William Dalrymple, “The Bloody Legacy of Indian Partition,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2015.
[78] Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “A Changing India: Caught Between Illiberalism and Social Revolution,” The Diplomat, August 18, 2019.
[79] “India has highest religious social hostilities: Pew study,” Deccan Herald, February 27, 2015.
[80] “A Fact Sheet on Communal Riots in India,” Public Policy Research Centre (PPRC).
[81] Ibid.
[82] “India tribal woman suspected of witchcraft gang-raped,” BBC News, June 1, 2015.
[83] Julie McCarthy, “Indian Village Elders Accused Of Ordering Gang Rape,” NPR, January 23, 2014.
[84] Moumita Mondal, “Misuse of Section 295A of IPC in light of Sudheer Rikhari v. State of Goa,” iPleaders, May 12, 2021.
[85] Ajit Warrier, “Section 295A IPC And The Slippery Slope Of 'Outrage',” Mondaq, December 7, 2020.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ramji Lal Modi vs The State Of UP, Indian Kanoon, April 5, 1957.
[88] Ramji Lal Modi vs The State Of UP, Indian Kanoon, April 5, 1957.
[89] The Superintendent, Central vs Ram Manohar Lohia, Indian Kanoon, January 21, 1960.
[90] Ibid.
[91] Arup Bhuyan vs State of Assam, Indian Kanoon, February 3, 2011.
[92] S. Rangarajan Etc vs P. Jagjivan Ram, Indian Kanoon, March 30, 1989.
[93] Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar, Indian Kanoon, January 20, 1962.
[94] Jacob Mchangama and Raghav Mendiratta, “Time To End India's War on Sedition,” Lawfare, June 25, 2021.
[95] Ibid.
[96] Akriti Gaur, “Moderate Globally Impact Locally: Tackling Social Media's Hate Speech Problem in India,” Yale Law School Blog, September 28, 2020.
[97] Chinmayi Arun, and Nayak, Nakul, (“Preliminary Findings on Online Hate Speech and the Law in India,” Berkman Klein Center Research Publication, December 8, 2016), 6.
[98] Murali Krishnan, “WhatsApp in India: Scourge of violence-inciting fake news tough to tackle,” Deutsche Welle, March 11, 2020.
[99] Neeti Nair, “A 91-year-old law is making a comeback in India due to lynchings and WhatsApp forwards,” ThePrint, August 26, 2018.
[100] Mohit Rao, “Karnataka Has More Sedition Cases Based On Social-Media Posts Than Any State. Most Are Illegal,” Article 14, July 13, 2021.
[101] “Information Technology Act, 2000,” India Code, June 9, 2000.
[102] Ibid.
[103] Vinod Joseph and Deeya Ray, “Cyber Crimes Under The IPC And IT Act - An Uneasy Co-Existence,” Mondaq, February 10, 2020.
[104] Sachin Mandlik, Jaideep Singh Khattar, and Kaushiki Agarwal, “Bombay High Court On The Dual Applicability Of The Information Technology Act, 2000 And Indian Penal Code, 1860 For Same Offence,” Mondaq, December 12, 2018.
[105] Shreya Singhal vs UOI, Indian Kanoon, March 24, 2015.
[106] Ibid.
[107] Ibid.
[108] “SC underlines restrictions on use of Sec 144. What is this law, and how is it used?,” The Indian Express, January 10, 2020.
[109] Anuradha Bhasin vs Union of India, Indian Kanoon, January 10, 2020.
[110] Sakshi Rai and Nikita Bansal, “India's Spiraling Sedition Crisis & Why A Dilution Of The Law Will Not Prevent Its Misuse,” Article 14, December 2, 2021.
[111] “UP Invokes Sedition Against Kashmiri Students; Families, Activists Urge for Release,” The Wire, October 29, 2021.
[112] Mohit Rao, “Karnataka Has More Sedition Cases Based On Social-Media Posts Than Any State. Most Are Illegal,” Article 14, July 13, 2021.
[113] “Militant Hindutva Leader Yati Narsinghanand Arrested in 2 Cases, Sent to 14-Day Judicial Custody.” The Wire, January 17, 2022.
[114] Mohit Rao, “Karnataka Has More Sedition Cases Based On Social-Media Posts Than Any State. Most Are Illegal,” Article 14, July 13, 2021.
[115] Sakshi Rai and Nikita Bansal, “India's Spiraling Sedition Crisis & Why A Dilution Of The Law Will Not Prevent Its Misuse,” Article 14, December 2, 2021.
[116] “India permanently bans TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps,” Nikkei Asia, January 26, 2021.
[117] “38 Chinese soldiers died in Galwan clash: Oz report,” The Times of India, February 4, 2022.
[118] “India bans TikTok, WeChat and dozens more Chinese apps,” BBC News, June 29, 2020.
[119] “Information Technology Act, 2000,” India Code, June 9, 2000.
[120] Ibid.
[121] “Govt To Continue Ban On Chinese Apps Including Tiktok: Report,” Mint, January 23, 2021.
[122] Jeremy Kahn, “Why did India just ban TikTok, UC Browser and WeChat?”, Fortune, June 29, 2020.
[123] Yashraj Sharma, “Instagram has largely replaced TikTok in India, and erased working-class creators,” Rest of World, October 6, 2021.
[124] Sarah Perez, “Instagram, still benefiting from TikTok's ban in India, again became the top app by downloads in Q4,” TechCrunch, January, 12, 2022.
[125] Emily Schmall and Stanley Reed, “India Finds Russian Oil an Irresistible Deal, No Matter the Diplomatic Pressure,” The New York Times, May, 4, 2022.
[126] Aashish Aryan, “Social media and safe harbour,” The India Express, June 2, 2021.
[127] See Section 3(1)(b) of the 2021 Rules, “IT(Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021,” Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, February 25, 2021.
[128] Sandipan Deb, “44 million pending court cases: How did we get here?,” Money Control, December 5, 2021.
[129] “Information Technology Act, 2000,” India Code, June 9, 2000.
[130] Ibid.
[131] Ibid.
[132] Section 3 of the 2021 Rules, “IT(Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021,” Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, February 25, 2021.
[133] Akhilesh Pillalamarri and Cody Stanley, “Online Content Regulation: An International Comparison,” International Law and Policy Brief at GW Law, December 8, 2021.
[134] Ibid.
[135] Ibid.
[136] Shweta Venkatesan and Priyesh Mishra, “Being a compliance officer at Twitter will be tough. IT rules should inspire trust, not fear,” ThePrint, June 9, 2021.
[137] Manish Singh, “India asks social media firms if they have complied with new regulations,” Tech Crunch, May 26, 2021.
[138] “Twitter slams Indian police 'intimidation', new IT rules,” France24, May 25, 2021.
[139] “Twitter seeking to undermine India's legal system, government says,” The Economic Times, May 28, 2021.
[140] Upmanyu Trivedi, “India Court Says Twitter in 'Total Non Compliance' of New Rules,” Bloomberg, July 28, 2021.
[141] Jon Porter, “Twitter is now obeying India’s new internet rules, government tells court,” Verge, August 11, 2021.
[142] Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz, “WhatsApp Says It Filed Suit in India to Prevent Tracing of Encrypted Messages,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2021.
[143] Madhu Balaji, “Meta removed over 27 million content pieces in India on Facebook, Instagram,” The Hindu Business Line, May 5, 2022.
[144] Deepsekhar Choudhury, “WhatsApp doesn't have fundamental rights, can't challenge Indian law: Govt,” Business Standard News, October 22, 2021.
[145] “Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor,” Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives, 1755–1756, The National Archives.
[146] Akhilesh Pillalamarri, Conversation with Usama Khilji, Director of Bolo Bhi, November 1, 2021.
[147] Kevin Roose, “Facebook Oversight Board Tells Zuckerberg He's the Decider on Trump,” The New York Times, May 6, 2021.
[148] Sudhir Krishnaswamy. Profile, Facebook Oversight Board.
[149] Katrina Manson, “Russia's Invasion Is Accelerating Splinternet, French Envoy Says,” Bloomberg, March 21, 2022.
[150] Ashley J. Tellis, “India as a Leading Power,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April, 4, 2016.
[151] This is difficult to fully qualify but is based on what anecdotes I believe to be true on the basis of my experiences as a journalist who focused on India for over five years.
[152] Nandan Unnikrishnan, “1971: When Delhi and Moscow came together,” Observer Research Foundation. August 16, 2021.
[153] Sutirtho Patranobis, “India may cross China as most populous sooner than thought,” Hindustan Times, May 12, 2021.
[154] Chinmayi Arun, “Facebook's Faces,” Harvard Law Review Forum, Volume 135, March 20, 2022.