“BAH kyrmen, nyngkong eh nga iaroh ia ka kynhun ba kala pynmih ia ki views jong.” To most Indians this expression of rebellion in the language of the Khasi militants of the northeastern Meghalaya state would be as mystifying as double Dutch. But it has upset the government of India so much that it has banned a large part of the Internet from being accessed within the country because it transmits the rebels’ point of view.

The unusual move raised questions about the intentions of the right-wing government in New Delhi, and has undermined the credentials of its key leaders who once pretended to be champions of democracy and free speech. Not the least among these is Mr Arun Shourie, a former editor of the Indian Express and currently minister for communications, information technology and disinvestment. Significantly, Mr Shourie has also held the portfolio of northeastern affairs in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government. He is now the target of scores of petitions from those who once admired his outspoken journalism.

What happened is this. Last Monday, when some of the regular users tried to access Yahoo Groups, they got messages saying the site had been blocked. Yahoo.com was clueless. Neville Taraporewala, who heads the group’s India operations, said he had received no communication from the government.

“We realized Yahoo Groups had been blocked when users started calling us. On checking with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), we came to know the government had told them to block the site.”

The government’s move it seems was quiet and sudden. In a notification dated August 10, the directorate of telecommunications asked the country’s ISPs to block groups.yahoo.com/groups/kynhun for “promoting anti-national news and containing material against the government of India and the state government of Meghalaya.”

The Kynhun Group, which has barely 25 members and had posted a total of 20 messages, is run by an organization called Hynniewtrep International Liberation Council. Though some of the messages call for independence, many of them are about corruption, police brutality against minorities and lack of public infrastructure.

Was the Indian government’s move to ostensibly ban the Kynhun Group from cyberspace designed to get the ISPs to block all Yahoo Groups — a service provided by Yahoo, where users can form their own groups to share ideas and information?

There are tempting reasons to believe this is so, because the “kynhun” site is not any more anti-India than many others that have not been singled out.

The topics posted on “kynhun” include discussions on editorials published in newspapers and frequent calls to the youth to “not be afraid” and promote “their cause”. The site is dedicated to issues concerning the governance of the north east states, particularly Meghalaya.

It functions under the broad motto of: “Oh people, rise up from your deep slumber for it is time to fight for the nation and its future.” The membership is open to all, and anyone can post messages, all of which “require approval.”

Blocking the Indian public’s access to “kynhun” does not affect its presence on the global Internet. Users in the rest of the world will still be able to read and exchange messages on it. But it was not possible to gain membership of the site from New Delhi at this writing.

“Blocking of a near invisible website ordered by Indian agencies in the name of national security is reprehensible enough, but the blocking of an entire domain, namely groups.yahoo.com is criminal,” says Harsh Kapoor who runs the web-based campaign, Sarai, The New Media Initiative.

This is not the first time the Indian government has tried to block websites. During the Kargil war of 1999, the website of a prominent Pakistani daily was blocked, which was very vigorously fought by many in the media in India and some activists abroad.

“This current move to block Internet content for thousands of users is a serious violation of freedom of expression and sets a very dangerous precedent of censorship and control of the Internet in India. Human rights groups in India, South Asia and around the world need to take note and express concern,” says Kapoor.

The move has placed India in the league of similarly inclined nations. Russia has forced its ISPs to install surveillance equipment. Myanmar’s “Cyberspace Warfare Centre” hacks into computers that receive or send forbidden messages. In China, “cyber-dissidents” have been imprisoned. In Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia as well as Iran, access to the web is restricted to government servers and subject to strict surveillance. Now was it an Indian foreign ministry official who said last week, albeit in a different context, that you are known by the company you keep?

WASHINGTON: With voters more concerned about the US economy than even Iraq, President George W. Bush got more bad news on Friday as the Census Bureau reported a 1.1 per cent drop in median household income last year and an increase of nearly 1.7 million people who were living in poverty.

The latest figures showed the income of middle-class families declining 3.3 per cent, or almost 1,500 dollars, since 2000, the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Similarly, the poverty rate has jumped from its all-time low of 11.3 per cent under Clinton in the year 2000 to 12.1 per cent, bringing the total number of residents living in poverty to almost 35 million, according to the official data.

“It’s hard to recognize an economic recovery in these numbers,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank closely tied to US labour unions. “The broad-based bite of the jobless recovery in 2002 eroded living standards for families at all income levels.”

Democratic candidates, who have been hammering Bush for weeks for being the first president since Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) to have overseen the net loss of jobs during his term in office, were quick to jump on the new statistics as additional evidence of poor economic policies. Some three million jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001.

“This is sad news that the Bush administration is trying to sweep under the rung,” said North Carolina Senator John Edwards, one of the 10 declared candidates. “I’d like to hear President Bush explain to all the single mothers with kids living in poverty how his tax breaks for the rich are helping them.”

Indeed, the latest numbers will make it still more difficult for Bush to persuade voters that the economic recovery that he has touted for most of this year has as much strength as he and the Republicans have been saying. The 2001 recession officially ended almost one year ago, in November 2001.

According to a battery of recent polls, the economy is emerging as the major concern for voters just 13 months before the November 2004 elections, and confidence in Bush’s economic policies has fallen sharply over the past six months to the benefit of Democrats.

“President Bush is facing an electorate that is almost as focused on the economy as it was in the fall of 1991, when rising economic concern began to unravel his father’s re-election campaign,” said a study by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, released on Thursday.

An accompanying survey found that at this point in the campaign, Bush holds a “statistically insignificant lead” over a generic Democrat among registered voters.

At a comparable point in the 1992 election campaign, Bush’s father, who had hoped to coast to victory on his Gulf War laurels, dominated the polls, despite the rising anxiety about the economy in what at that time was called a “jobless recovery”.

“It’s the economy, stupid” became the unofficial slogan that propelled Bill Clinton past Bush senior and into the White House.

The administration and some investors have predicted that the economy will pick up speed in 2004, possibly even surpassing a four percent annual growth rate, but even if it does, the question is whether average voters will feels the impact.

Robert Greenstein, an economist at the Centre for Budget and Policy Priorities, told reporters Friday that he expected next year’s report — on income and poverty trends for 2003 —will also be bad news for the administration. That report will be released just six weeks before the presidential elections.

“We would expect that the poverty rate is likely to go up further and income to decline further for 2003,” he said, noting that the Labour Department has alreadyady predicted a decline in average wages for 2003.

The 2002 results announced on Friday, he said, were not unexpected, despite the recession having ended last November. Poverty rates and income levels are much more closely tied to unemployment than to the official resumption of economic growth, he said.

According to Greenstein, poverty increases were found in every racial and ethnic category, but blacks, who benefited most from the record economic expansion during the Clinton years, suffered the worst deterioration. Some 24.1 per cent of all blacks lived in poverty in 2002, compared to 22.7 per cent in 2001.

Similarly, black households saw the largest losses in income — a three per cent decline over one year, the Census bureau found.

Another politically sensitive indicator — poverty rates for children — also rose. More than 12.1 million children were found to be living in poverty last year, compared to 11.7 per cent in 2001, with most of the increases hitting black and Latino children.

The political sensitivity derives from Bush’s own campaign slogan as a self-described “compassionate conservative”: ‘Leave no child behind’.

“The nation does not have a money problem,” said Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defence Fund (CDF).

“It has a values and priorities problem. Our children are getting poorer while the Bush administration and congressional leaders work to dismantle protections for children to pay for a 93,500-dollar tax break to millionaires and consider spending billions to rebuild Iraq,” she said.

The latest poverty data are likely to be used by Democrats and even some Republicans in the coming weeks both to assail Bush’s proposal to spend 87 billion dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year and to press a growing movement in Congress to at least partially repeal the massive tax cuts that Bush has touted as his major domestic accomplishment.

With the unexpectedly high bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress faces a more than 400-billion-dollar deficit for this year that will be even higher for 2004.

At the same time, polls published this past week show that many more voters prefer to repeal the tax cuts — most of which benefited the wealthiest citizens — as a way to pay for the deficits, rather than to reduce social programmes.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.