Blogging Up A Firewall

Received this article over e-mail some days ago, and just have to share it as an outstanding example of the power of the Internet and blogging - the spread information and (attempt to) capture attention. Considering my earlier posting on what Pooja Chauhan did to capture public attention, this may be a less taxing technique. The context, however, is far more serious - death-threats. And this to a senior public servant whose crime happens to be - exposing corruption among his colleagues.

Four years ago, India was rocked by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, a government engineer who exposed corruption in the national highway building program. Two years later, Shanmughan Manjunath, a manager at a state-owned oil company, laid bare a scheme to sell impure gasoline. His body was found riddled with bullets in the back seat of his car.

To Ms. Jayashree, her husband, M. N. Vijayakumar, appeared to be following in their footsteps. Mr. Vijayakumar, 51, is a bureaucrat in the southern state of Karnataka, and he has a penchant for chastising colleagues who supplement their modest salaries with bribes, kickbacks and garden-variety pilferage.

In recent months, his chastising ruffled feathers at high levels, and he began seeing the signs often directed at whistle-blowers in India: He was pushed around the civil service like a hockey puck, switching jobs seven times in the last nine months, most recently on June 26.

As her husband made powerful enemies, Ms. Jayashree began to fear for his life. And so she devised an unusual ploy to protect him: she blogged.

In the YouTube era, she reasoned, it is harder to kill a man who has a bit of Internet renown.

“We’re creating a fortress around him — a fortress of people,” she said in a telephone interview. “I wanted to inform the people that this is happening, that my husband is a whistle-blower, so that it becomes the responsibility of every citizen to protect him.”
The result is a small-scale test of whether India’s technology revolution, which is empowering tens of millions, can tamp the corruption that hinders India’s ambitions.
From the article In India, Protecting A Whistle Blower, in The NY Times

Check out Ms. Jayashree’s blog - Fight Corruption Now.

Thanks for the forward SA, read the full article.