MB Civic

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI, July 21 — After two days of angry inquiries and charges of government censorship, the Indian government took a step Thursday toward explaining a mysterious blockade on personal blogs, calling it “a technological error” that would be repaired soon.

In an e-mail message sent early on Thursday, India time, an official at the office of the Consulate General of India in New York said the order to block a handful of Web sites, including the popular blogspot.com, which plays host to thousands of personal blogs, had been prompted by the discovery of a site that contained what the official called “two impertinent pages” rife with material considered to be “extremely derogatory references to Islam.”

In an effort to stave off potential sectarian violence, the official said, the government’s Department of Telecommunications instructed Internet service providers to block access to the two pages. “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them, which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs,” the official explained.

As of Friday, however, the sites remained blocked.

The consulate’s response came a day after a number of news articles on the matter appeared in the American news media, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. It remained unclear why, despite repeated efforts, officials at the Department of Telecommunications in the capital, New Delhi, refused to provide any explanations for the blockade earlier this week.

The blockade has sown anger and confusion among Indian bloggers, who accuse the government of censorship and demand to know why their sites have been jammed.

Among the speculations that had been offered was that certain blogs could be used by terrorists to coordinate operations.

On Tuesday, when reports of the blockade emerged, officials at the Ministry of Communications did not return repeated calls. Gulshan Rai, an official at the ministry’s Department of Information Technology, said he was aware of “two pages” that had been blocked for spreading what he called antinational sentiments, but did not provide details.

Also on Tuesday, a technician at a Bangalore-based service center of one Internet provider said the government had ordered blogspot.com to be blocked “due to security reasons.” A service provider in New Delhi said the government, without explanation, had directed his company to block access to fewer than a dozen sites; he could offer no details on the nature of those sites.

The secretary for telecommunications, D. S. Mathur, hung up the phone when reached at home.