WHEN tens of thousands of migrant workers started fleeing cities in southern India such as Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad last month, chased out by false text messages on their phones that north-easterners were being targeted in retaliation for anti-Muslim rioting in Assam, two things became apparent immediately.

First, that while we’ve figured out how to make nukes, and are planning to conquer the moon and outer space, there is cluelessness in the corridors of power about how to deal with the newest source of our insecurity — mobile telephony and cyberspace. Second, that the people of northeast India, who have for decades been marginalised by the ‘mainland’, do not have the confidence that the state will protect them, should their lives be on the mat.

India has upward of 900 million cellphone subscribers. This staggeringly large base was a matter of pride for policymakers — ‘our networked country’ — until last month, when it turned into a nightmare overnight. State governments could only watch as workers from the northeast, who had moved to the ‘growth’ cities of south India, packed the trains to go back to their homes, ironically enough in a region that is ridden with conflict.

South Indian metropolises are usually considered safer and friendlier for migrants — Chennai, for instance, has no record of communal violence — than the cities of northern India. But the rumour, fast forwarded through SMS, proved more powerful than facts on the ground. Karnataka’s home minister was at the railway station pleading with people not to go but there were few takers for his assurances.

Any teenager could have told the bureaucrats in New Delhi that the response when it came, a ban on bulk messaging (subsequently lifted) until Sept 10 — in this case, bulk meant more than five text messages a day — was as futile as trying to fix a leaking tap with a handkerchief. Guess what? There’s life after SMS, and its thriving.

Within hours, mobile users from 16 to 60 had switched to Whatsapp. BBM was no longer the preserve of corporate executives. Newspapers did helpful stories on how to beat the SMS ban through other social media. And, even if the five-message ceiling helped to stem the rumours, how long could the government have kept it going? It was no surprise that after a week, and perhaps some pressure from cellphone giants, the ceiling was raised to 20 messages a day.

Did anyone who decides these things think that it might be an idea to turn the weapon on itself, that the rumours could be countered by using the same method as the rumour mongers — by sending out bulk texts giving the correct picture, telling people they were safe, that the government would give them all protection and there was no need to flee?

Doesn’t seem like it, going by the other step that the government initiated — the blocking of more than 300 items on the Internet — on Facebook, YouTube, pages on certain websites, a few websites, and Twitter handles.

South Asians are in love with the phrase ‘application of mind’, but the list of sites ordered blocked shows no sign of it. Included are at least two items, both from Pakistani sites — one a page from an individual’s website and another blog page from a newspaper site — that exposed attempts to incite religious passions over the communal clashes in Myanmar. That’s the kind of stuff that needed wider circulation. Now, if only someone had been applying their mind…

A web page of a prominent Indian newspaper found itself on the list. The Twitter handle of a pro-BJP journalist was among the 20 blocked. ‘Tweeple’ are enraged — they see a sinister political plot here by the Manmohan Singh government to silence criticism. Sorry, but it sounds less like censorship and more like ineptitude. Or else why would the government ban the journalist on Twitter but permit him to continue writing in the newspapers?

No sensible person would argue that hate speech on the Internet should be allowed a free run. But in the world’s largest democracy, there is surely a case for acting with transparency. A mile-long list of rules exists, with its own mile-long name (Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009) under the Information Technology Act.

The government may invoke these rules to take down Internet content. India’s Internet activists don’t like many of these provisions and are campaigning against them. Strangely enough though, the Ministry of Communication & IT, which issued the orders for blocking the content, did not bother citing any of those rules.

Reading the Riots is a joint study by the London School of Economics and the Guardian, on the August 2011 riots in London, and it should be compulsory literature for anyone trying to understand the layered role of social media in unrest.

While the rioters used BBM to communicate with one another, Twitter, on the other hand, played a positive role, contributing in a big way towards the post-riots cleanup. “Even just including tweeters whose cleanup-related messages were reposted more than 1,000 times, the cleanup mobilisation reached more than seven million Twitter users — far in excess of any incitement tweets,” the report notes.

What this means is hate in cyberspace can be fought through the same medium. But before that, there is no getting away from the reality that it was not just the false texts that sent people running back to their homes in the northeast.

It was also the deep feelings of insecurity in a people who feel excluded from the mainstream Indian narrative, and worse, have long been at the receiving end of overt and covert racism in ‘mainland’ India.

They were not prepared to believe that the state would do anything to safeguard their lives. What that means is that you can send all the reassuring messages you want, through new media or old, but people won’t believe you unless you make them feel safe, protected and equal.

The writer is a journalist with The Hindu and the newspaper’s former Pakistan correspondent.