Kamlesh Vaswani #fundie nytimes.com

Without warning or explanation, the Indian government this weekend ordered Internet service providers to block access to 857 pornography websites that had been singled out by an anti-pornography activist.

The activist, Kamlesh Vaswani, a lawyer who failed to persuade the Supreme Court to block online pornography, gave thanks on Monday to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for taking a step that the Supreme Court would not. “Under Prime Minister Modi’s good governance and the good faith with which this government has been working,” Mr. Vaswani said in an interview, “they have been instrumental in blocking the 857 websites that I have been looking to get blocked.”

Mr. Vaswani, 43, a private lawyer from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, said he decided to begin a legal crusade against online pornography in response to the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a New Delhi bus in 2012. With help from a college engineering professor, Mr. Vaswani analyzed traffic data for pornography websites and came up with a list of the most popular sites. This list of 857 websites, he said, is what he asked the Supreme Court to block.

“Nothing can more efficiently destroy a person, fizzle their mind, evaporate their future, eliminate their potential or destroy society like pornography,” Mr. Vaswani wrote in his petition to the Supreme Court. “It is worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic,” he added. “It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped.”

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