[Imc-india] censorship on indymedia?

[boud]

hi rahul, everyone,

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Rahul Rao wrote:

> my motivation for wanting to become involved in the revitalisation
> of india indymedia stems from a particularly annoying experience i
> had yesterday. i posted an article concerning an anti-narendra modi
> demonstration in london.

> http://india.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=7010&group=webcast

> the article was hidden in less than 2 hours. normally i would have
> assumed that there was a perfectly logical explanation for this (and
> perhaps there still is). the demonstration took place on aug 17, so
> the article may have been taken down because it was old news. but
> what this led me to realise is that someone *IS* being extremely
> vigilant about what stays on the newswire. clearly, whoever is
> exercising editorial control thinks it's ok for pieces threatening
> murder, rape and genocide to stay on the newswire, but hides within
> 2 hours a slightly dated article about a multi-faith, multi-issue
> demonstration against one of india's most hideously right wing
> politicians.

Narendra Modi is complicit in genocide. The hiding of your post 
is extremely worrying. The fact that the demo happened 10 days 
ago is a very feeble argument for hiding it. 

The only alternative explanation i can see is that the "someone" who
hid your article accidentally clicked on the wrong button - and it's
true that (at least in the past) the central column features often had
incorrectly entered URLs in links.

Can anyone point out any other clearly valid posts which have been
hidden? Just one occurrence might be a mistake. If we know it's happened
several times it becomes harder to believe it could be by error.


> i'm all for open publishing and quite happy to see things i don't
> agree with on the india indymedia website, but what seems to be
> going on is censorship.

Any other examples?

Anyway, i suggest you add your name to the proposal that ganesh
is now working on - IMHO it would be good that each person who 
feels they should have password access (or who wants to participate
in decisions on hiding, but without having password access), write
some self-introduction. If you're together going to form a local-global
collective, you need to get to know each other and show to others
something about what your media and socio-political interests are.
This may help override theoretical debates on who is "local" and who
is "expat" etc.  In fact maybe what you could do is participate
in the Cambridge UK indy group - you'll have to browse a bit to
find contact details (e.g. start at http://indymedia.org.uk  or look
through  http://lists.indymedia.org and look for what seems to be
the most relevant UK list). That way you would have face-to-face
contact with the indy network.

solidarity
boud