The Indian government who is under fire from the Twitter users and certain political parties for  ordering internet service providers to block about 20 twitter accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security, has clarified that it not targeting individual accounts or websites.

“We have no way to find out the identities. So the accusations that we are aggressively targeting someone’s account or websites are incorrect”, said Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communication and Information Technology in a statement.

The following is the full text of his statement:

“The difficulty is that twitter is a site, which operates from outside India and the server of all such sites are outside the jurisdiction of India. We are happy that Facebook and Google are cooperating with us and the names of the objectionable sites that we had provided them; they cooperated with us on them and decided to close down those sites. We have also imposed restriction on those sites. But as far as twitter is concerned, now they have said that they are ready for talks with us. But the solution to this problem should be a permanent one. That will only happen when we talk to all the stakeholders and form such a mechanism under which any objectionable content is removed. We can take action but in that case restrictions are also imposed on people who are right on their part. So, we don’t want that to happen. So, we have provided 28 URL numbers under which objectionable material is being shown. Now the government does not know that who is behind these URL numbers, only twitter and other sites are aware about it. Later if those URL numbers are innocent, and then the accusations would be thrown at the government. Actually we don’t have the identities; we have no way to find out the identities. So, the accusations that we are aggressively targeting someone’s account or websites are incorrect.”