Pakistan to unblock Wikipedia, after restricting site for 'blasphemy'
Islamabad (PTI): Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has ordered authorities to unblock Wikipedia "with immediate effect", days after the country's telecommuni cation watchdog banned the online encyclopedia for its failure to remove offensive and blasphemous content.
"The Prime Minister is pleased to direct that the website (Wikipedia) may be restored with immediate effect," Pakistan's Minister of Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb posted the Prime Minister's order to her Twitter account on Monday.
"The Prime Minister has also constituted a Cabinet Committee on matters related to Wikipedia and other online content," she added.
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said it blocked Wikipedia because a 48-hour deadline to remove the content was ignored, according to a spokesperson.
"Such things hurt the sentiments of Muslims," said Malahat Obaid, the spokesperson of the regulator.
An opportunity for a hearing was also provided; however, the platform neither complied by removing the blasphemous content nor appeared before the authority, the spokesperson said.
Given the intentional failure on part of the platform to comply with the directions of PTA, the services of Wikipedia were degraded for 48 hours with the direction to block/remove the reported contents.
Last Friday, the Wikimedia Foundation said "it does not make decisions around what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained".
It added that this is "by design to ensure that articles are the result of many people coming together to determine what information should be presented on the site, resulting in richer, more neutral articles".
Critics have denounced the move, saying it was an affront to Pakistanis rights to access information.
Social media giants Facebook and YouTube have been blocked in the past over content deemed blasphemous.
In December 2020, the PTA issued notices to Wikipedia and Google Inc for "disseminating sacrilegious content", while the country blocked YouTube from 2012 to 2016.
Pakistan also blocked the video-sharing app TikTok several times in recent years over its failure to stop posting "indecent" and "immoral" content.
Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Muslim-majority Pakistan.
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Rahul Gandhi demands 'clean, pure' voter list; says 'vote theft' issue will explode soon
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New Delhi (PTI): Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday said the Opposition is protesting for the right to vote for every Indian and demanded a "clean and pure" voter list, asserting that the issue of alleged irregularities pointed out by him will "explode" soon as it is not related to a single constituency but the whole country.
Indicating that he would not submit a signed affidavit as sought by the Election Commission, Gandhi asserted that the data analysed by the Congress to provide "proof" of "vote theft" is taken from the EC website.
"This is their data. It is not my data that I should sign. It is their data only and has been taken from their website. This is only a move to distract," he told reporters.
The Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, who participated in a protest march by the opposition on the "vote theft" issue, said the Election Commission is "silent" as the truth is before the entire nation after his charge that over one lakh votes in an assembly constituency in Karnataka were found to be fake in a research conducted by his party.
"Another thing I want to tell is that this has not just happened in Bangalore, but in different constituencies across the country, and the Election Commission knows this. The EC knows that this data will explode. What it is trying to control and hide, we will bring it out, and it will explode. The EC knows this," he told reporters.
Gandhi was briefly detained along with others as police stopped the protest march by opposition MPs from Parliament House to the EC office.
"They (EC) cannot talk as the truth is before the entire nation," the Congress leader said as he was being taken away in a bus by the police.
"This fight is not political, but for saving the Constitution," he asserted.
This fight is for 'one man, one vote' and we want a clean, pure voter list," the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha added.
He said all the MPs of the INDIA alliance were stopped and taken into custody when they were going to meet the Election Commission.
"The truth of 'vote theft' is now before the country. This fight is not political; it is a fight to protect democracy, the Constitution, and the right to ‘one person, one vote’.
"The united opposition and every voter in the country demand a clean and transparent voter list. And, we will secure this right at all costs," Gandhi claimed in a post on X later.
Gandhi had on Thursday cited data from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls to claim that over 1 lakh votes were "stolen" through five types of manipulation in Mahadevapura assembly segment in Karnataka. He alleged there were 11,965 duplicate voters, 40,009 with fake and invalid addresses, 10,452 bulk voters or single-address voters, 4,132 voters with invalid photos and 33,692 voters misusing Form 6 of new voters.
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