New Delhi: The government's decision to clamp down on 857 pornographic websites across the country has not gone down well with the masses. Although the country's top sex and behavioural experts argue for making sex education mandatory for young Indian teenagers rather than blocking porn websites, Indore-based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani finds a connection between pornography on the Internet and sex crimes.
And in a bid to ensure safety of "innocent, susceptible, vulnerable women and children of India", Vaswani had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in 2013 and urged the Supreme Court to direct the central government to "block pornography websites, platforms, links, or down loading by whatever other Internet means or name in order to prevent easy access whether in private or public".
Although the government has now asked the Internet Service Providers (ISP) to review the ban on 857 websites, which were blocked as pornography sites, and lift the ban on non-porn ones, yet the decision has created enough flutters.
As the government moved to block 857 porn websites in India, the 43-year-old Vaswani told The Huffington Post that he was happy that his two-and-a-half-year fight “has brought this day”.
The Sindhi lawyer joined the Indore High Court in 1998 after failed attempts to pass medical entrance exams and civil services.
When he read an article in The Hindu in 2012 on the shortage of officers in the armed forces, Vaswani said: "I felt that there was very little positive contribution of the youth in India... They only care about porn.”
After the 2012 December gang-rape incident shook the country, it took Vaswani “a while to draft it (PIL) but I thought if I didn't do it then who would? At least I'm an advocate."
“My fight has been against obscenity. I feel watching porn fuels violence against women. It propels men to commit sex crimes. I saw no women come forward and speak up against pornography, so I did it,” he told the Hindustan Times.
“Just look around you and there are evidences. Rapes and gang-rapes are happening all over. In some cases, the accused have even accepted watching pornographic film before attacking women,” he added.
Vaswani said he has a list of around 5,000-6,000 more websites that he was planning to send to the government that also need to be blocked.
"Some IIT experts have kindly agreed to cooperate and help me with the list since this is a service to the country... at the time of filing the PIL there were four crore such websites and now the number must be even bigger," he told The Huffington Post. "The ones we sent was a list of the most horrible and shocking ones... To be very frank it was sent in a hurry."
The advocate, however, feels that all porn websites can't be blocked in India, but believes it is a good beginning. The reason why internet service providers have delayed blocking these sites for so long is the revenue generated from such sites.
"Nobody cares about the children, or what's in the national interest," he said. "They only care about their pockets."
He asserted that there was no positive contribution from porn. "I have a problem with porn that exploits children as well as porn that children can access," he said. "If a child can access some porn that is also a crime."
Vaswani now wants to file a petition on providing free cancer treatment to all poor people.
