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The Union government on Friday, May 9, told independent news outlet The Wire that its website had been blocked in India due to technical limitations, in response to a complaint about a story published on a Rafale jet.
While The Wire removed the story in question, founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan said the website would pursue remedies to this “unconstitutional attack on the freedom of the press.”
The website of The Wire was blocked in India on Friday, May 9. Siddharth Varadarajan then wrote to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) seeking clarification on why the website was blocked.
While the website has now been unblocked, The Wire said in a statement issued on Saturday, May 10, that readers on various networks in different parts of the country are still unable to access the news site.
The Wire said in a statement that the MIB wrote back on May 9, saying that the government was forced to block the entire website due to technical limitations.
MIB had said that in the case of https websites, only full domains could be blocked, and not specific sub-pages. The MIB also requested that The Wire take appropriate action regarding that content and “inform of the action taken, which would enable the Ministry to unblock the website.”
The Wire informed the Union government that it had removed the story from public view at 10.40 pm on Friday, May 9, because its “priority” was to get the website unblocked, and it had “no option but to comply with this unfair demand while reserving our rights under the Constitution of India to seek appropriate remedies.”
It told the MIB that the Union government’s decision violated the Information Technology (IT) Act, as the MIB should have first issued a notice to The Wire and given the website a chance to present its views.
Siddharth said that the government could have gone ahead with the blocking only if The Wire refused to comply with the Inter-Departmental Committee’s insistence on the story’s deletion.
Siddharth noted that the story in question was published on May 8, and the information it reported about was widely available at least 12 hours earlier, from CNN, another news website, whose story has remained widely available in India since then.
“I fail to see why the government wants our story deleted and treated it as such a matter of emergency more than 24 hours after publication that no notice was even served to us and our entire website blocked,” he said in the statement.
Siddharth noted that even in the case of an emergency, procedure had to be followed. “Even in the exercise of emergency powers, the first step is a direction to the concerned party under the relevant rules. The MIB omitted to even respond to our query for seven hours after we wrote to it,” he said.
The MIB letter said that The Wire would be given a chance to present its “comments/clarifications” before an Inter-Departmental Committee “constituted under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.