The Supreme Court may have set the government an impossible task in asking it to find a way to control pornographic material on the Internet.
However well-intentioned the views of the learned judges may be, it is apparent that the problem is more than a hydra-headed monster. Just as we can hope to tackle gender violence by deterrence and strict implementation of the rigorous new laws in the short term, and by sensitisation of the population and with education in the long term, so too can we hope to make pornography a manageable problem.
To have Central control of the Internet is a virtual impossibility. The Net has expanded far beyond governments. Sentinels of the Internet, including the most popular search engines, themselves are at a loss as to how to keep tinkering with their filters so as to cut out the worst excesses of pornography, like paedophilia. Totalitarian states either take over all Internet access by investing millions of dollars or they make the punishment barbaric, such as public hangings and caning of offenders. Indian society cannot even think of such state behaviour.
A major problem is people below the age of consent accessing such material. We know for a fact that such content can go beyond prurience and feed the monster of gender violence with which we are currently contending. India gave the world the Kama Sutra ages ago, but we suffer the after-effects of having been a sexually repressed society for long now. The long-term answer may lie in sex education from a young age.
