The document discusses various phobias that Indian politicians seem to be suffering from, such as comment-o-phobia, cartoon-o-phobia, and tweet-o-phobia, brought on by citizens' use of social media to criticize them. It provides examples of citizens who have faced legal consequences like arrests for their online comments and cartoons about politicians. While laws aim to curb hate speech and defamation, the broad criteria of the IT Act allow harassment of citizens for expressing opinions online. The document concludes by quoting Tagore's call for a nation with freedom of thought and expression.

1. Is Your Mind Without Fear And
Head Held High?
By Upasana Sharma

2. Phobias!
• Indian politicians and political parties seem to be suffering
from assorted forms of phobias.
• Apart from the known ones, which even the mere mortal
citizens suffer from, our mighty politicians suffer from new
21st century phobias like, comment-o-phobia, cartoon-o-
phobia, expression-o-phobia, tweet-o-phobia and some even
suffer from the rare one; like-o-phobia.
• The technological advancement, easy access to the internet
and its capability to make anything viral is what has been
discovered as the root cause of these phobias.

3. “Sentiments” hurt and consequences
followed?
• Citizens resort to the internet to express themselves in the
form of comments, tweets, cartoons and images.
• Some, who agree, end up liking them too.
• Consequences in terms of arrests, beating up, breaking into
houses and sometimes, even uprooting of lives and shifting
elsewhere.
• In the past we have seen many such instances wherein
cartoons, comments and tweets against politicians or even
their relatives result in arrests and deactivation of accounts
on social networking sites.
• A college student in Kolkata, a cartoonist in Mumbai, an
industrialist in Puducherry, a professor at Jadavpur university
and, the most recent, an engineer from UP, are the best
known examples.

4. Right to not Speak act?
• It’s true; a difference is to be made between free speech, hate
speech and defamation, and the rules and laws should be
amended accordingly.
• The section which empowers the government and officials to
act against these expressions, section 66A of the Information
Technology Act makes it a crime for anyone to digitally send
information that is “grossly offensive” or has “menacing
character” or which causes anyone “annoyance” or
“inconvenience”.
• These criteria make it very easy for anyone to harass any
citizen who uses the internet to speak out and express his or
her opinions.

5. Between the right and the wrong
• Time magazine had once said “In India, the world’s largest
democracy, civil rights are running up against the world of
social media.”
• World over, policing of the internet is done to grab hold of
people with unlawful behavior, like in the U.S police nabbed a
gang for murder because they were bragging about it on
Facebook.
• But Indian authorities use the internet to curb civil rights
rather than use it as a means to uphold them.

6. • Democracy as defined by Abraham Lincoln is “government of
the people, by the people and for the people” and India has
been regarded as a country with liberal democratic values,
but the past few years have been a show of a weakening
resolve from India to stand by those values.
• Instances like imposing cuts on a Bollywood movie as it
showed a “Free Tibet” flag for a fleeting moment, give out the
sorry state of affairs in the world’s largest democracy.

7. Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s words
for us!
• Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by
narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening
thought and action –
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

8. • Read more on Youth Ki Awaaz at http://bit.ly/XqqmIE