Greater than half of these shutdowns have been recorded in Kashmir as India leads the Entry Now checklist for a fifth consecutive yr.
Authorities final yr shut down the web not less than 187 instances in a file 35 international locations – the very best quantity ever in a single yr. India leads the worldwide checklist with 84 shutdowns, 49 of them recorded in Indian-administered Kashmir.
These have been the findings of a report launched on Tuesday by digital rights watchdog Entry Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, which mentioned governments are utilizing web shutdowns as “weapons of management and shields of impunity”.
India – labelled “the largest offender” – led the watchdog’s checklist for a fifth consecutive yr. It was, nonetheless, the primary time since 2017 that India noticed fewer than 100 web shutdowns, in accordance with the report.
We documented 187 #InternetShutdowns throughout 35 international locations — the very best variety of international locations ever recorded by the #KeepItOn coalition in a single yr. pic.twitter.com/gQzIUaYFo2
— Entry Now (@accessnow) February 28, 2023
“Authorities disrupted web entry not less than 49 instances in [Indian-administered] Kashmir as a result of political instability and violence, together with a string of 16 back-to-back orders for three-day-long curfew-style shutdowns in January and February 2022,” the report mentioned.
In 2021, about 80 % of all shutdowns in India have been within the disputed Himalayan area, in contrast with 58 % in 2022, it added.
Kashmir is claimed in its entirety by each India and Pakistan, who management elements of it. A decades-old in style riot in opposition to New Delhi’s rule on the Indian aspect has seen one of many world’s highest deployments of safety forces within the area.
Since 2019 when India’s right-wing authorities, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, scrapped Indian-administered Kashmir’s particular standing, the area has witnessed an unprecedented crackdown on residents and the imposition of legal guidelines and insurance policies which critics say are geared toward marginalising and oppressing the nation’s solely Muslim-majority area.
Srinivas Kodali, digital rights activist and researcher with the Free Software program Motion of India, instructed Al Jazeera that web shutdowns are taking place in India as a result of the federal government can afford to dam Indian-administered Kashmir out.
“It's a type of repression. The federal government is telling those that except you toe the road, you'll not be allowed to be a part of a standard world,” he mentioned.
Kodali mentioned web shutdowns are additionally a type of “financial blockade”.
“Now we have heard so many tales about how shutting down the web in Kashmir takes away folks’s proper from collaborating in any commerce and commerce on-line. It's not nearly speech, it is usually financial in nature. If it was simply in regards to the speech, the federal government has sufficient censorship powers,” he mentioned.
“So, the suppression that the federal government is doing with the web in India is not only a type of censorship but in addition a type of financial blockade. It hurts folks badly. It's not simply that individuals are being censored and silenced, it impacts them economically.”
The opposite Indian areas talked about within the Entry Now report included the West Bengal (7) and Rajasthan (12) states – each ruled by political events against Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion (BJP).
The authorities in these states responded to “protests, communal violence, and exams with disruptions that impacted the every day lives of thousands and thousands of individuals for tons of of hours in 2022,” mentioned the report.
Different nations that noticed numerous web shutdowns included Iran, Myanmar, Russia and Ethiopia.
“In 2022, below authoritarian regimes and in democracies, powermongers accelerated their use of those callous ways, disrupting the web to gasoline their agendas of oppression – manipulating narratives, silencing voices and making certain cowl for their very own acts of violence and abuse,” mentioned Felicia Anthonio, the #KeepItOn marketing campaign supervisor at Entry Now, in a press release.
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