If you were on M.G. road last Sunday like me hoping to join the meeting about India's CMS, which I also wrote about in my last post, you were probably as disappointed as I was. The protests had been called off cause the group that started it did not find a good enough response in the days leading up to the event.
However, there's a call for the protest again, this time to be held in a few months time which leaves us a lot of time to gather together and spread the word better. I hope to do my part in talking about it.
A lot of people around me seem to think that this issue isn't important enough when there are so many other bigger issues that need our attention. I had a talk along these lines with a friend last evening.
There's a very common saying 'Information is power'.
If you agree with that, who would you trust with that power today?
I don't see how this issue isn't relevant when it is in these last few years than at any other time in our country's history, that we've been besieged with news about how power has been blatantly misused for personal gains in various creative ways by the few who wield it. Call me paranoid, if you like but this clamour for even more invasive monitoring of everyone's private communications and also the wider internet makes me imagine a world where there will soon be huge markets to buy and sell private information on an even more dangerous level than before, it's because I simply don't expect the information that will be gathered under CMS to not be disseminated among all the wrong people if it suits the people controlling it. There's still no known cure for greed.
Most importantly, I worry for the whistleblowers and the activists, these are people who I think do very valuable work and frequently at great personal risk. In our country, this kind of surveillance will only diminish our freedom of expression further because our politicians only seem to use it quash any negative opinions and control what us little people think of them.
There's a rather old story that I want to end with, it won't immediately connect with the monitoring issue at hand but still gives us something to think about how information when entrusted with people can be misused. About ten years ago, a man was murdered in Gaya, Bihar. His name was Satyendra Dubey. During the course of the investigation that followed, it was revealed that this project director at the National Highways authority India (NHAI) had written a letter directly to the PM, critical of the financial irregularities in the Golden Quadrilateral project. This letter was subsequently circulated inside the government and leaked despite the whistleblower's request to keep his identity a secret. It was quite clear to most people that the sensitive information in the letter was allowed to fall into the wrong hands and which soon led to the murder of a very brave, honest man.
Do you still feel this issue isn't relevant enough to you?
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