The strange disappearance of porn sites without a government ban is the latest chapter in a series of extra-Constitutional measures adopted by Indian governments to effectively circumvent the Supreme Court. The issue is bigger than just porn, with personal liberty coming under fire.

The mysterious disappearance of popular Internet porn websites in India over the last couple of days is similar to the white van abductions of people in Sri Lanka at the height of the island’s civil war — people inconvenient to the government went missing, while the government claimed it didn’t know a thing.

In India, what now greets surfers instead of these sites — that apparently had a cult following in the country — is white space. There is no message from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that the sites have been blocked under orders from the government (as happens in countries where online porn is illegal). These sites have just vanished into cyber ether and might never return.

The non-availability of Internet porn is certainly not a crisis, but the surreptitious manner in which it’s disappearing, that too without an official ban, smacks of a dangerous extra-Constitutional threat to personal liberty. It is naive to assume that the ISPs acted of their own volition without being asked to do so by somebody in the government. When even the Supreme Court is reluctant to ban Internet porn because of insufficient justifiable circumstances, the government has been able to do it extra-judicially. It will never own up, but in effect, gets its way.

This is not merely about Internet porn, but about throttling personal liberty, and the stealthy behaviour of the State. The fate of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History sometime last year was similar. There was no official ban, except a case against the book in a Delhi court, but the publishers (Penguin) got into an out-of-court settlement with the petitioner and pulped the book. The author was “angry and disappointed”, but Penguin couldn’t help it because it clearly knew the frightful consequences of not backing down. This is the same extra-Constitutional authority exercised not only by governments, but also political parties with mob strength, that leads to the abduction of movies, paintings and other works of art from Indian public spaces. History tell us that this is called fascism.

If the government does want to ban online porn for whatever reasons, it has to come up with a policy and a piece of legislation, or convince the apex court to pass orders that will make its job legal. The SC in 2014 had favoured strict laws against Internet porn while the present Chief Justice wanted to hear the Union government’s view before he took a call. Under the present circumstances, he said he couldn’t issue an interim ban because it would violate Article 21 (personal liberty).

Now, let’s come to the merits of the anti-porn sentiment. Except in the case of child pornography, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that the so-called sexual smut harms anyone. There were studies galore to see if it made people sexual offenders, sexists and perpetrators of violence against women, and none of them found any merit in the argument for banning it. A 2011 Scientific American article that copiously quoted from several sample surveys and studies from journals said that porn led to none of the detriments that it is believed to cause. On the contrary, there is scientific possibility to suggest that the porn could have a mitigating influence on people since it offered an alternative (self-medication with fantasy) to sexual satisfaction. The only negative impact seemed to be the possibility of “relationship problems”. Some people do get addicted and end up preferring the virtual to the real.

Just as a BJP spokesman on an NDTV discussion cited the example of Saudi Arabia, where cruel forms of Sharia-based punishment deterred (according to him) crime, to justify Yakub Memon’s hanging, the moralists will certainly cite the examples of Iceland and England (essentially David Cameron’s conservative personal views), where governments have anti-porn sentiments. In most parts of the world, the outrage is driven by morality.

In other words, the abomination of porn, or rather Internet-porn because of its profusion, is moral than rational, and is symbolic of the intolerance to dissent, liberty and rationality. And that’s not a good sign for a democratic, rights-based society. The idea of silencing contrarian views with morality and authority, rather than by the right application of law, is medieval.

Even if one goes by the moral argument, will the government pull down all those centuries old temple sculptures depicting sex? Even by the worst Internet porn standards, the sculptures are vulgar, graphic, and celebrate unnatural sex and bestiality. More over, they are cast in stone and are permanent exhibits in important places of worship in at least eight states, both in the north and the south. Don’t people get ideas of sexual deviance from these images just because they are in our temples? Don’t these sculptures say something progressive and iconoclastic about our cultural past and non-linearity of history that are different from what the right-wing moralists are trying to interpret for us?

It really doesn’t matter if the government bans Internet porn because people who cannot live without it will easily find alternate sources. But, it will indeed expose the government’s proclivity to overlook the real underlying issues that foster and perpetuate sexism, violence against women, and exploitation of girls and women. Thailand is a strange example — its police blocks porn sites and cracks down on pavement porn vendors, because they are immoral and against Thai culture, but Bangkok is the sex capital of the world and a magnet for one of the largest number of girls and women trafficked into sex trade. For the Thai authorities, banning porn is easy, stopping real exploitative sex and trafficking is not.

The public assertion of certain notions of morality, and looking at everything that is ideologically inconvenient as “leftist” is worrying. In the pre-emergency days, Indira Gandhi possessed and promoted this paranoia, and we know what happened next. Are we witnessing signs of a movement that would strike "against the backwardness of the right and the destructiveness of the left,” as Mussolini said in 1921?