A bench of Chief Justice U.U. Lalit and Justice S. Ravindra Bhat said child sex abuse is a crime by itself and police investigation into individual cases would show whether or not viewing of pornography had triggered the crime.
It observed a judicial declaration from the apex court that porn on the Internet has led to child sex crimes would be like giving a go-ahead to online surveillance. “What you are advocating may be surveillance and collection of data,” the bench told senior counsel and BJP leader Nalin Kohli, who was the petitioner-in-person.
During the hearing, Justice Bhat cited a US Supreme Court verdict in connection with a question of banning the Internet to a certain class in order not to give them access to porn. He said one of the judges there observed ‘We cannot set the house on fire to roast a pig’.”
The top court said the government has sufficient resources to deploy to ensure that criminal material is not uploaded on the Internet.
The bench queried Kohli whether the court should intervene, if petitioner’s final goal is that such material should not be uploaded, and added that this is a tiger and if it gets loose, the problem is at what point the court would control it.
Kohli cited an incident in Assam where a direct link was found between pornography and sexual assault on a minor girl. To this, the bench said: “The issue of the link between viewing pornography and crime is individual case specific.”
The plea sought a direction to the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) to collect data in a time bound from all the state police organisations on the specific issue of investigations revealing a direct link between viewing of pornographic material and acts of rape.
After hearing arguments, the top court declined to entertain the plea and Kohli withdrew the petition.
