There both is and isn't a porn ban in India. Over the weekend, the government sort-of enforced its partial wish to see porn disappear from our screens and on Tuesday it sort-of withdrew its half-baked ban. Porn remains illegal in India, but watching porn doesn't. And the government doesn't want to go after your porn. Unless it's child porn. Or "hardcore." Confused? We are too.

India's "porn ban" is sort of like Maharashtra's prohibition. It's illegal to transmit obscene material, electronically or otherwise, and that term is broad enough that it cover anything from barely raunchy "non-veg" jokes and Bollywood item numbers to the worst stuff you can find in the dark underbelly of the internet. Yet the government, prompted by the Supreme Court, says it isn't interested in telling you what you can or can't watch, at least within the confines of your bedroom.

To a degree that is. Over the weekend, porn sites started disappearing from across the web and no one was quite sure what was happening until the Centre for Internet and Society leaked a Department of Telecom order calling for the "disabling" of an unprecedented 857 websites on grounds of morality and decency. Much of the sites contained therein were clearly pornographic, but the list also happened to feature things like CollegeHumor.com, a comedy video website, and torrent search engines.

It was unclear how the government came up with the list, although many surmised that it might have directly come from Kamlesh Vaswani, the petitioner who has asked for authorities to prohibit porn – via a Public Interest Litigation petition in the Supreme Court. The government itself hasn't made any official comment on how it came up with the list, although unnamed sources have told the media all sorts of things: that the order is temporary, that it was aimed at addressing the Supreme Court's concerns about child porn, that it wasn't bedrooms but public spaces which the government wants to regulate.

On Tuesday, news reports even suggested the government wanted to create the post of a porn ombudsman, who would oversee regulation of content on the internet. (Shovon Choudhary has promptly applied for the position). Even more ridiculously, an unnamed official told the Financial Times that the government wasn't blocking porn because you could still access it via a Virtual Private Network, which is technology that people all over the globe use to get around bans.

Later on the same day, the government appears to have backtracked on its leaked order, this time admitting some more problematic things on the way.




Again, nothing official yet, as the  government's press information bureau has no details on the matter. The Times of India reported telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad saying will unblock websites that do not feature "child porn." He also seemed to suggest that the government had indeed simply blocked everything on the petitioner's list.

Any admission of a withdrawal automatically comes with questions though. If it's going to restrict blocking to "child and hardcore porn," how are those parameters going to be laid out? Who will carry out the task of deciding what amounts to "hardcore" but not "softcore"? And if it is lifting the ban from websites which "do not carry pornographic material" why were they banned in the first place?

Remember, the "obscenity" and "morality" terms could plausibly cover even a comedy site like CollegeHumor, without needing to show that it is pornographic, justifying the government's blocking of it. But that opens up a whole other can of worms: Does this government really want to get into the job of policing everything on the internet?