Bloggers are the most outrageous, free thinking and creative of the entire media space. What the mainstream media do not dare to utter, the bloggers speak of freely. Bloggers are now pulling in the numbers too – a blogger with a million visitors a month is no more an unusual thing.

As the stature and importance of bloggers rise, their safety and freedom is increasingly coming under threat. Devoid of institutional support, they are easy preys, as we saw in the case of blogger Abhijit Roy. Are bloggers under unprecedented threat? Will bloggers manage to stay independent and free from fear of violence, and continue to write about things that they want to write?

I started blogging in 2008. I first realized that blogging can piss off people when I wrote a post about not-so-good recruitment of a certain law school. People called me up and abused me. I got tons of abusive mails on social media as people alleged that I was trying to make my blog popular by hurting careers and images of other people. I was taken aback – does no one expect that the truth will be written about?

However, facing the wrath of political propagandists or religious fanatics online is quite another thing. Note that this happens more on social media – such as Facebook and Twitter. It is as if people do not have any restraint when it comes to online debates, and they come online prepared to demolish any opposition with abuses and personal attacks. They do not care about reason or discourse. For them, the only way to win the argument is to steamroll the person expressing a deviant opinion by shaming, abusing and bullying.

I once wrote about how a verse in the Quran suggests that Muslims should ambush non-muslims, and kill or enslave them. This is a verse that ISIS now uses to justify what they do to the Kurds or Yazidi prisoners. I was deluged with abuses from Muslim fundamentalists, and even a few Hindu fundamentalists joined them because they saw an atheist as a common enemy. I was threatened with physical harm and death publicly on my wall.

Still, it seemed so far that most of these online fundamentalists and bullies are keyboard jockeys, and don’t really pack any punch outside the computer screens. However, as militant fringe groups have been taking to social media like zombies to Halloween, things are changing. There are highly organized groups which are capable of orchestrating real life attacks on bloggers who they see as crossing the line. It has started happening even during elections that very active political bloggers who are not backed by big parties would get threatening calls. Are attacks possible? I don’t think that those days are far away.

The free thinking bloggers and social media activists now carry a lot of weight and make a huge difference as far as public opinion is concerned. We could see this from how the AAP benefited from the support of such bloggers and social media activists. And this is a big threat to a lot of people who want to take over the online space with their propaganda. They are ready to go to any extent when their intentions are thwarted or exposed by independent bloggers.

So yes, bloggers are at risk. There is a price for freedom of speech and expression, and as the government is not particularly keen on protecting dissent or free speech, the price may be very high for individuals at times. Sometimes, they are in fact threatened by the government itself – which can throw the weight of the state against an individual blogger if powers that be are displeased.

It is a tough world for bloggers in India.