Is online lifeline?

A blog can be much more than an online platform for personal musings. A housewife in Bangalore has made it her whistleblower husband’s lifeline. Scared that her husband, IAS officer M N Vijayakumar’s fight against corruption in the bureaucracy posed a threat to his life, Jayashree has taken the battle to the blogosphere. In this age of the internet, she is counting on the power of information to protect him.

"I do not want him to meet the end that whistleblowers like Satyendra Dubey and Manjunath did. Only after they died did people find out what they had done to expose corruption," says the spirited Jayashree. The plight of her husband, who has been transferred seven times in the last nine months, initially made her think along the lines of writing a book.

"I realised that a book would have limited reach while a blog would help me mobilise public opinion." Her son, who is a computer science student at Delaware State University in the US, helped her set it up but the battle is all hers.

Every day, she sits on the computer in her two-room apartment updating the blog, replying to comments and adding links to media reports. And support is coming from across the world. Her blog has already received over 20,000 hits and the guestbook already runs into several pages. "What started out as an individual battle has mobilised the like-minded," she says.

Besides chronicling the case of the 51-year-old Vijayakumar, who has filed 25 formal complaints detailing instances of corruption in Karnataka, the blog tells people how to fight a legal battle against corruption and explains the use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act.