When the authorities realised that hate SMSes and MMSes were going viral and inciting the Muslim community against people from the northeastern region, they did the first instinctive thing they could — a 15-day ban on bulk text and multimedia messaging through mobile phones, a gadget that about 900 million Indians routinely use.
This sort of blanket physical restraint has been the traditional response of India’s police forces. Isolating a problem area and placing just that under restraint is a more sophisticated approach that calls for painstaking effort, and has not found favour with the government. Perhaps it might be best not to be too harsh on the authorities, given the situation of panic we found ourselves in about a week ago, when people from the Northeast were heading home in droves from Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. But the time has surely come to review the bulk-ban policy.
The Cellular Operators Association of India estimates that about eight per cent of its monthly revenues have been lost in a week of the ban. Considerable economic and business activity takes place these days through the data services provided by mobile phones. Our modern-day economy cannot tolerate a key functioning aspect of this device going off-air for even a day, leave alone a fortnight. The government should end the ban now and focus on those who transmitted the offending SMSes and MMS clips. It has had enough time to catch them, and some are said to be already in the bag.