The cyber-world  is ultimately  ungovernable.  This is alarming  as well  as convenient,  sometimes,  convenient because alarming.  Some Indian politicians use this to great advantage.  When there is an obvious failure in governance during a crisis they deflect attention from their own incompetence towards the ungovernable.

So, having failed to prevent nervous citizens from fleeing their cities of work by assuring them of proper protection,  some national leaders are now busy trying to prove to one another and to panic-prone Indians,  that a mischievous neighbour has been using the Internet and social networking sites to spread dangerous rumours. And the  Centre’s automatic reaction is to start blocking these sites and begin elaborate and potentially endless negotiations with Google,  Twitter and Facebook  about  access to information.  If this is the official idea of prompt action at a time of crisis among  communities,  then Indians have more reason  to  fear  their  protectors  than the nebulous  mischief-makers  of  the  Cyber-world.

Wasting time  gathering proof,  blocking  vaguely  suspicious websites,  hurling accusations across the border  and  worrying about bilateral relation;  are ways of  keeping busy with  inessentials because  one  does not quite know what to do about the essentials of a difficult situation.  Besides, only a  fifth of the 245 websites blocked by the Centre mention the people of the North-East or the violence in Assam.

And if a few morphed images and spurious texts can unsettle an entire nation,  then there is something deeply wrong with the nation and with how it is being governed.  This is what its leaders should be addressing immediately,  rather than making a wrongheaded  display of their powers of censorship.

It is just as absurd and part of the same syndrome,  to try to ban Twitter accounts that parody despatches from the  Prime Minister’s office.  To describe such forms of humour and dissent as ‘misrepresenting’  the PMO- as if  Twitterers  would  take  these  parodies  for  genuine  despatches  from the PMO- makes the PMO  look more ridiculous than its parodists  manage to.

With the precedent  for such action set recently by the Chief Minister of  West Bengal,  this is yet another proof that what Bengal thinks today India will think tomorrow. Using the Cyber-world for flexing the wrong muscles is essentially not funny.  It might even prove to be quite  dangerously distracting.