Kamlesh Vaswani is a happy man today. The Indore High Court lawyer has been waiting for more than two years for the day, when pornographic websites would be blocked and all the “innocent, susceptible, vulnerable women and children of India” will be safe again.
“It is two-and-a-half years of hard work that has brought this day.” But before he could even imagine the kind of impact his petition would have, he argued hard in the Supreme Court trying to convince it about the ill effects of pornography. At one point he even says that pop-up ads on porn sites are most annoying and hence they must be banned! Most of these are assertions that are not backed up by any study or expert opinion.
1. PIL for the innocent, susceptible, vulnerable: Vaswani said in his PIL that he is fighting for the fundamental rights of 75 percent Indians who are the “innocent, susceptible, vulnerable women and children”.
2. Porn is moral cancer: He claims that pornography “is like moral cancer that is eating our entire society at every second across country”. He has described it as “a trade more deadly than potassium cyanide”.
3. The ‘worst killer’: According to Vaswani, porn is a “plague” which hampers people’s peace of mind, health and wellness, and puts their happiness and human potential at risk. “Most people know someone affected by this plague, the worst killer that has ever been devised,” he writes in his PIL.
4. Worse than AIDS or Hitler, Porn is a slow killer: “Nothing can more efficiently destroy a person, fizzle their mind, evaporate their future, eliminate their potential or destroy society like pornography,” says the petition. “It is worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust…”
5. Real sex doesn’t ‘measure up’: Vaswani contends that people who watch porn struggle to emulate it in their actual sex lives — only to fail.
6. Annoying pop-up ads: He argues that a big reason for his overwhelming concern against pornography is the “display of advertisement of pornographic websites without the permission of the viewer”. Interestingly, his contention is that these could prove embarrassing in certain gatherings.”
7. Not an attack on freedom of expression: According to Vaswani, making porn illegal and enforcing a total ban “is not a very serious attack on the freedom of speech and expression”. He argues that since porn is “neither speech nor expression”, but “purely a conduct”, it is an anti-societal pursuit.
8. Mental images can never be erased: End of argument.
