The Reason

The reason out is that the government is trying to crack down on terrorist blogs, and this is only temporary. They have sent out notices to the ISPs asking them to block out those domains for the time-being, while they can sort it out. Someone at digg who took the initiative to find out has put up:

Two sources, one inside the Government of India and the other kind of inside/outside have confirmed to the Mutiny, that ISPs are being instructed to 'control' access to blogspot. It seems that some blogs are being used by some terror units (read SIMI) to communicate.

There is a crack down in place. IP numbers are being physically located and identified. All should come back to normal once this operation is over. There is no ban in place. Livejournal and Wordpress have been spared. No reason given.

Now I know you are not going to believe this, so I'm going to quote what she said, "This operation is limited to certain parts of India. Bloggers in Andaman, Nicobar and Lakhsadeep islands are not affected." I thought she was joking but I didn't hear the reciprocal laughter from the other end of the phone line.

Their reasons seem fair enough, but at the end of the day, you have to wonder how this helps India continue the run up to their campaign for Right To Information act recently introduced.

Democracy and RTI

Sure, I understand that anything that goes public goes to the terrorists out there too, who are (supposedly) the targets in this sudden spat of idiosyncracy. But maybe a word to us would have atleast let us know what is happening. The RTI act seems to be failing miserably, as is the democracy in the biggest democracy in the world.

We have nothing to do right now but wait for this to pass, because as they have said, it'll pass eventually. Since the main domain has been blocked, no RSS feeds or content will get through to anyone. Thankfully for everyone, I use Feedburner (which thankfully has access to Blogspot) and hence if you subscribe to my feed, you can continue to get updates whether the blog is blocked or not!

I shall keep updating this post as the developments continue!

[Update]:: The block is slowly being lifted now! Apparently it was a gross misunderstanding on the part of the ISPs, or they were just trying to suck up a bit too well! Here's Avatar's article

[Update]: PKblogs is back up for us! Although, I'd still suggest The Cloak