The ban on porn in India is interesting in many ways – for some, it is a way to break through any dependency and addiction, while for some others it has become a lesson on how to use VPNs. The idea behind the porn ban in India is clear – the government wants to prevent sexual violence, if any, depicted in pornography from trickling down into violence against women in India.
Wow, is India’s porn “ban” really just black-holing DNS queries?! Was this designed by the same people that made #aadhaar “unhackable”?! https://t.co/NvWgUM8Stk
https://twitter.com/K2852000/status/1057934165201477633
The original petition in favor of a complete ban on porn, which was filed by Kamlesh Vaswani, is currently awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court and although the government had blocked access to the 857 sites listed by the petitioner in 2015, sites other than those hosting child pornography were unblocked following outrage on social media.
However, research shows that teens do not really have a problem outpacing their parents in bypassing any methods used to block porn or other sites.
This, however, is subject to the condition that porn is viewed in private and not displayed in public. As long as the consumption is private, anyone viewing pornography cannot be prosecuted, even if they use a bypass such as a VPN.
While Gupta believes that it might be virtually impossible to block porn, he also emphasizes the linkage between porn and the freedom of expression. Although the liberty of expressing your sexuality has been debated endlessly, Gupta insists that we must explore this freedom on par with other human rights. He cites Cyber Sexy, a book by Richa Kaul Padte which explores porn and it’s necessity in the fulfillment of female sexual desires and personality development.
Gupta warned that these questions on the validity of online porn are not easy to answer but instead convoluted and indeed “hydra-headed“, as the Supreme Court of India has called them in the past.
