Porn Ban Continues To Rile Indians

NEW DELHI, India—It's illegal to sell sexually explicit DVDs in India, so almost needless to say, as soon as the country's banning of 857 adult websites went into effect over the weekend, the underground market in pirated adult DVDs took off like gangbusters.

"With the ban preventing download of adult content, people and retailers queued up in markets like Palika Bazar, Lajpat Nagar and Paharganj in New Delhi, where the DVD business is known to be flourishing more than before," reported the Times of India. "DVDs available for Rs 100 [USD$1.57] last week are being sold for Rs 300 [USD$4.70]. Also, an 8GB normal DVD is costing around Rs 300 containing 10-12 HD clips of all sorts."

($4.70 may not seem like a lot to Americans, but consider that the average Indian citizen had an annual income of just $1570 in 2013.)

In other porn-ban news, many Indian film fans had been waiting for U.S. adult-star-turned-Bollywood-star Sunny Leone to weigh in on the issue, but so far, her comments have been limited to posting a photo of herself with her husband Daniel Weber, he wearing a T-shirt with the logo "$ex $ells," while her written comment was simply a pair of eye-winks: ";;."

Of course, Leone's lack of more in-depth comment may have something to do with the fact that the actress is still fighting the "first information report" or FIR that had been filed against her with the Mumbai police, charging that she was "promoting obscenity and affecting society."

And finally, the apparent instigators for the porn site ban have been revealed, with the main crusader for the ban being 43-year-old attorney Kamlesh Vaswani, who had filed a "public interest litigation" (or PIL) petition in 2013, in which he argued that, "[N]othing can more efficiently destroy a person, fizzle their mind, evaporate their future, eliminate their potential or destroy society like pornography ... It is so terrible that many do not even recognize it until it is too late, and most refuse to admit it. It is worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped."

Vaswani's petition was first heard by India's Supreme Court in April 2013, but the case was continued until August 2014, at which time the Indian government admitted that since there were more than 40 million adult websites, it was proving difficult to block them, although just last month, Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand told the high court that the government would soon do "whatever is possible about banning pornographic sites."

Enter Ghazi Muhammad Abdullah, a 15-year-old Pakistani who wrote to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), the country's Chief Justice and the Ministry of Information Technology in 2011, asking them to block adult websites in Pakistan. However, when the PTA responded to Abdullah that it would need a list of the URLs which he wanted blocked, Abdullah was ready with a list of more than 780,000 adult sites, which he had spent the previous six months compiling.

"I consider this as my religious and national task to do. If my elders don't do this for my generation, then I will do it for mine and forthcoming generations," Abdullah told The Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2012.

It was apparently from Abdullah's list that Vaswani came up with his list of sites he wanted banned in India.

"My fight has been against obscenity," Vaswani told the Hindustan Times. "I feel watching porn fuels violence against women. It propels men to commit sex crimes. I saw no women come forward and speak up against pornography, so I did it ...  Just look around you and there are evidences. Rapes and gang-rapes are happening all over. In some cases, the accused have even accepted watching pornographic film before attacking women."

Vaswani also told the newspaper that he didn't believe reports that Indian women were watching porn as well as men.

"I do not think these reports and data are authentic," he retorted. "To say Indian women watch porn is an insult to their dignity. Some may watch but it's not right to authoritatively comment on it and publish reports."

But although Indians now have access to some of the sites originally banned, it is unclear when or if the bans on the remainder will also fall—and an online poll conducted by the Hindustan Times revealed that as of today, 71 percent of respondents opposed the porn ban, while only 27 percent supported it.

Pictured, l-r: Sunny Leone, Daniel Weber and Kamlesh Vaswani.