India steps up blogger blocker

Blogs 'pitting Muslim against non-Muslim', claims communications minister

The Indian government has restricted access to blogs and websites which it claims are promoting religious hatred.

The authorities contacted ISPs to block the sites after terrorist attacks on trains in Mumbai killed 180 people.

Gulshan Rai, director of the Ministry of Communication's Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, denied that the ban was a direct response to the attacks. "These blogs are pitting Muslim against non-Muslim," he told Reuters. 

A total of 17 sites are included in the ban, although some ISPs have simply blocked access to whole domains such as Google's blogspot.com which hosts thousands of sites. 

The list of banned domains includes sites such as hinduunity.org, exposingtheleft.blogspot.com and commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com, according to a scan of the letter sent to ISPs posted on photo sharing site Flickr.

The letter lists all 17 sites and tells the ISPs: "You are accordingly directed to block the above mentioned websites immediately and report compliance."

Instructions on how to circumvent the ban have been written up on the Censorship Wikia website. 

Search firms, such as Google and Yahoo, have been criticised for giving in to censorship in China.