Indian Official Misleads Press About Blog Bannings

From the International Herald Tribune (emphasis added):

In an e-mail sent early Thursday, an official at the Consulate General of India in New York said that the order to block a handful of Web sites, including the popular blogspot.com, which hosts thousands of personal Web logs, had been prompted by the discovery of a Web site that contained "two impertinent pages" rife with material containing "extremely derogatory references to Islam."

In an effort to stave off sectarian violence, said the official, who was not authorized to speak to the press, India's Department of Telecommunications instructed Internet service providers to block access to the two pages.

In fact, the Indians moved to block access not to "a web site", but to eighteen different web sites, resulting in Indian ISPs blocking thousands of blogspot and typepad blogs. Indian blogger Shivam Vij posts a scan of the official order naming the sites here.

This seems to be a misguided attempt to minimize the extent of the ban, which Dr. Rusty Shackleford of The Jawa Report considers to be a symptom of radical Muslim influence on Indian government.