‘Ban All Porn Sites,’ India State Leader Asks in Letter to Modi

More than a year after the government of India, the world’s second-most populous country, began requiring internet service providers to place blocks on more than 800 online porn sites, the top political leader in the country’s third-largest state is now calling on the national government to lay down a blanket ban on all porn sites—and other unspecified “inappropriate content.” Nitish Kumar (pictured above left), chief minister of Bihar—a state with a population of more than 103 million—wrote a letter to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (pictured above right) on Monday, claiming to link the availability of online porn to a recent spate of gang rape cases in the region, according to a report by the Indian television network NDTV.  "It will be my request to take appropriate action to ban all porn sites and inappropriate content available on internet immediately after giving due consideration to the serious issue," Kumar wrote in the letter. "In my view, the unlimited access to such inappropriate content cannot be allowed in the name of freedom of speech and expression.” Kumar, perhaps unsurprisingly, cited no evidence linking the availability of online porn to violent sex crimes. He cited unspecified instances in which “videos of heinous acts (rape) against girls and women [are] uploaded on social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook etc.” But the distribution of videos showing actual violent crimes has little to do with commercial online porn sites. Bihar is a state in eastern India, bordering on Nepal—which banned porn last year, also supposedly in response to a rise in rapes and sexual assaults in that country. Nepal ordered approximately 20,000 sites blocked from the country’s internet users. A year after Nepal imposed the ban, however, little had changed, as AVN.com reported last month. Nepalese internet users accessed porn sites at a higher rate than before the ban. At the same time, the ban had no effect on the rate of sexual assault, with reports of the crime also rising. Modi as of Wednesday had not issued a response to Kumar’s request to somehow ban “all porn sites” for India’s 1.3 billion people. Photo By Prime Minister's Office, Government of India / Wikimedia Commons