Before feeling relieved, quite rightly, that the draft - and daft - National Encryption Policy has been withdrawn by the Central department of electronics and information technology, it is important to ponder the implications of some of its excesses and absurdities. The draft had proposed norms and regulations not only for companies and applications that send and store their messages in encrypted form, but also for ordinary users. It wanted to stop the latter, for instance, from deleting their messages and emails on WhatsApp, Viber, Yahoo or Google for ninety days; these messages had to be kept in a plain-text format and made available on demand to security agencies. Naturally, this raised a massive and immediate outcry from security experts, advocates of civil liberties, private companies and ordinary citizens in the country. After Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, most users of mobile phones, computers and social media have become much less naïve, though not necessarily better informed, about privacy and surveillance, and the role of the State in these domains of everyday life. So, it is reassuring that protests against the draft policy were articulate and widespread enough for the government to distance itself quickly from its contents and reassure people that their "misgivings" were uncalled for. Besides, it would have been difficult for the prime minister to trail his clouds of digital glory through Silicon Valley while being associated with such attitudes.

Yet, the draft, together with its immediate withdrawal, makes evident two aspects of governance that ordinary citizens would have to be vigilant about. First, the government's knee-jerk reaction to matters of individual and collective privacy remains, at heart, regulatory and intrusive. What this draft, in particular, embodied was the State's unthinking will to surveillance. Second - and the thought is both alarming and perversely comforting - people who make such policies must be clueless about the technologies that they are trying to control. In allowing itself to imagine, even tentatively, that it could push through such a range of unrealistic checks on human expression and communication, the government has exposed its ignorance about the very phenomena it is trying to regulate. Insecurity breeds a kind of stupidity, which ordinary Indians might find somewhat disconcerting to see displayed in those who are ruling them.