AFTER VIOLENCE IN INDIA, A CRACKDOWN ONLINE

[The relationship between India’s government and growing social media has long been tense. For decades, the Indian government set and enforced strict standards for the country’s newspaper, film and television industries. But even a shadow of that sort of control has been impossible to exert over popular sites like Facebook and YouTube, where vast amounts of user-generated content are largely unsupervised.]

By Gardiner Harris

NEW DELHI — The recent panic that led tens of thousands of Indians to flee their homes has largely subsided, leaving in its wake an uneven government crackdown on the Internet and text-messaging services that top officials blame for circulating the baseless rumors that set off the exodus.

Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia, a spokesman for India’s Home Ministry, called the crackdown essential for preserving law and order. But many of the sites that the government has sought to block are general news sites, such as pages from the British newspaper The Telegraph. And some of the Twitter accounts that the government sought to freeze are those of journalists, critics or political comedians who appear to have done nothing to further any violence.

Pranesh Prakash, of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, said that the campaign showed evidence of the government simply flailing.

“I don’t see this as politically motivated censorship,” Mr. Prakash said. “I see this as gross ineptitude by the government.”

The restrictions came after a cascading series of attacks and counterattacks between rival ethnic groups in the northeastern state of Assam that claimed at least 78 lives, destroyed more than 14,000 homes and prompted nearly a half million people to flee to refugee camps. That conflict started in July and worsened in early August.

But there was no broader issue until a protest by Muslims in Mumbai turned violent, and some northeastern residents were attacked in the city of Pune. Suddenly Web sites and cellphone text messages started carrying misleading accounts that fed a nationwide panic among migrants from the northeast.

Government officials initially blamed Pakistan for fomenting ethnic tension, and officials limited each cellphone user to just five text messages per day and sought to block access to some 310 Web pages and sites.

The crackdown was so severe that the United States issued a cautious warning. On Thursday the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said, “as the Indian government seeks to preserve security, we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world.”

On Thursday night, the government increased to 20 from 5 the number of daily text messages that each of the country’s nearly 700 million mobile phone users could send. Even so, the restrictions are likely to affect tens of millions of users and have shut down thousands of businesses that use text messages for marketing.

“If you want us to send out free messages advocating peace and harmony, we are offering to do that,” said Subho Ray, president of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents some of the marketing companies. “But why are we banned from carrying out legitimate businesses?”

The relationship between India’s government and growing social media has long been tense. For decades, the Indian government set and enforced strict standards for the country’s newspaper, film and television industries. But even a shadow of that sort of control has been impossible to exert over popular sites like Facebook and YouTube, where vast amounts of user-generated content are largely unsupervised.

Last year, the government tried to enforce rules requiring that such content be preapproved, but they were withdrawn amid a storm of criticism. In 2006, the government blocked a number of blogs, including one by an American teenager who called herself Princess Kimberly. In 2009, the government banned a popular and sexually explicit online comic.

A major factor in the disconnect between India’s leadership and the world of social media is simply age. Of the country’s 100 million Internet users, the fastest-growing group of freewheeling texters and posters are under 25, the demographic that makes up half of India’s population of 1.2 billion people.

Raghav Bahl, a media executive and author, noted that, in contrast, most of India’s top political leaders are in their 70s and 80s and began their political careers as socialists who admired the Soviet Union.

“Today, they may grudgingly accept free-market reforms, but their core ideology remains socialist,” he said.

Analysts say that gap helps explain why the government has seen social media as one of the causes of the unrest rather than as a tool to curb it. There is widespread consensus among media analysts that India’s increasingly boisterous media are a crucial reason that the nation’s long history of ethnic rioting seems largely to be on the wane.

“In essence, the government has chosen to block rather than use social media to curb the violence,” Mr. Prakash said. “To stop rather than use SMS to calm things down. And that is a problem.”

Some Twitter users responded to the government’s restrictions by blacking out their display pictures. Some said they would stop posting for several weeks.

Mr. Dhatwalia said that the government valued press freedoms but had to hold social media to some standard of responsibility.

“What happens is that if certain information through social media is floating around which is objectionable to a certain country, that information is required to be stopped or removed from the public domain,” he said.

Government officials also complained that Twitter was initially resistant to demands that it freeze or suspend certain accounts.

“With regard to Twitter, they were asked to remove certain pages,” he said. “They have expressed certain technical difficulties in finding and removing those pages. There is a discussion about this.”

On Friday evening, the office of India’s prime minister announced that Twitter had complied with its requests to take action against six people who had been impersonating the prime minister on Twitter.

“Twitter has now conveyed to us that action has been taken, stating ‘We have removed the reported profiles from circulation due to violation of our Terms of Service regarding impersonation,’ ” the office announced.

Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman, declined to comment.

@ The New York Times

PAKISTANI MILITANT LEADER DIES IN AIRSTRIKE, NATO SAYS

[Pakistani officials have publicly accused NATO of failing to stop Taliban fighters sheltering in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan, from which American forces have largely withdrawn, from carrying out attacks inside Pakistan.]

By Declan Walsh

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — NATO forces said on Saturday that they had killed a senior Pakistani Taliban commander in an airstrike in Afghanistan, highlighting the increasingly complicated nature of the fight against Islamist militants along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mullah Dadullah, who led the Pakistani Taliban in the Bajaur tribal agency, was killed late Friday in a strike on a compound across the border in the Afghan province of Kunar, NATO and Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The Kunar police chief, Gen. Elwaz Mohammad Naziri, said 12 other militants, including Mullah Dadullah’s deputy, were also killed.

The death of Mullah Dadullah, a former prayer leader who rose through the Taliban ranks to become a commander, will have an impact on the fighting in Bajaur, where the Pakistani Army has been battling the Pakistani Taliban since 2008.

But it may also offer an opportunity for a fresh turn in the relations among NATO, Pakistani and Afghan forces along the porous border, which have been marred by acrid recriminations in recent months.

Pakistani officials have publicly accused NATO of failing to stop Taliban fighters sheltering in the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan, from which American forces have largely withdrawn, from carrying out attacks inside Pakistan.

The protests reached a crescendo in June after a Taliban ambush killed 13 Pakistani soldiers, 7 of whom were beheaded. Some Pakistani officials have gone as far as to accuse NATO and Afghan forces of secretly supporting the insurgents.

The Afghan government has replied by saying that Pakistan’s military regularly fires artillery salvos across the border into remote Afghan villages, killing scores of civilians. Tensions between border police on both sides have flared into gunfire several times in the last month.

NATO officials, meanwhile, note that Pakistan has failed to crack down on much larger Afghan Taliban sanctuaries inside its own territory — particularly in North Waziristan, farther west along the border, where the Haqqani network holds sway.

There, the campaign against the Taliban is being led by Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes, which have attacked targets in North Waziristan on four of the last eight days. Senior American officials say one of the strikes may have killed Badruddin Haqqani, the operational leader of the Haqqani network.

Now, Mullah Dadullah has become the most senior Pakistani Taliban commander to be killed by NATO in Afghanistan.

In Kabul, the Afghan capital, Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, described Mullah Dadullah as “an extremely dangerous militant” and said his death was part of a broader attempt at greater cross-border cooperation with Pakistan.

“We also have long believed that close cooperation with our Pakistani partners is critical in combating the menace of terrorism, and dealing with this target furthers that objective,” General Allen said in a statement.

NATO said Mullah Dadullah was important on the Afghan battlefield, too. In another statement, the military alliance said he “was responsible for the movement of fighters and weapons, as well as attacks on Afghan and coalition forces.”

A spokesman for Pakistan’s military was not immediately available for comment. But Asad Munir, a retired Pakistan military brigadier and former intelligence chief in Peshawar, said Mullah Dadullah’s killing was a “very calculated move that is likely to be appreciated by our army.”

“Their complaint has been that American and Afghan forces are not targeting the Pakistani Taliban,” he said. “This is a good sign.”

Mullah Dadullah, also the name of an Afghan commander of the Taliban who was killed in 2007, was the nom de guerre of Jamal Said, a prayer leader from the village of Damadola, in Bajaur. He rose through the ranks of the Pakistan Taliban and in 2008, headed its vice and virtue department, enforcing strict edicts based on a narrow interpretation of Islamic texts.

He became a commander in Bajaur after the Taliban leadership fired his predecessor, Maulvi Faqir Muhammad, for engaging in unauthorized peace talks with the Pakistani government.

Mr. Muhammad now leads a rival Taliban faction, which is also based in Afghanistan and has been attacking Pakistani border posts. His troops have clashed with those of Mullah Dadullah in the past month, a local reporter from Bajaur said by telephone.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan, and an employee of The New York Times from Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

@ The New York Times