With her ample bosom, skimpy sari and mischievous grin, Savita Bhabhi, India’s first and only online cartoon porn star, might not look like a threat to national security. But the country’s Government has made the fictional housewife seductress the first target of new laws, passed after last year’s terror attacks on Mumbai, that allow the authorities to block dangerous websites.

The Savita Bhabhi site, which features a series of daily cartoon strips based on the “sexual adventures of a hot Indian bhabhi” (sister-in-law), was created by Puneet Agarwal, 38, a British entrepreneur of Indian descent. Before being blocked in India it was attracting 60 million visitors a month, about 70 per cent of them from India.

The decision to block the site has bemused many onlookers. Despite featuring the adventures of a “regular Indian woman who just can’t get enough sex” and being managed by an outfit that calls itself the Indian Porn Empire, the venture appeared to owe as much to Benny Hill as to Hustler. One typically titillating storyline involved a travelling lingerie salesman ringing Savita’s doorbell and the escapades that followed. (“Can you help me please . . . The hook is stuck.”) Some pundits argued that Savita’s adventures drew on a rich tradition of Indian erotica, from the Kama Sutra, which dates back perhaps two millennia, to a long-established tradition in Indian popular culture of flirtation between a man and his elder brother’s wife. But above all, as Tehelka, a news weekly, observed, the strip appeared to “poke fun at the coy Indian attitude towards sexuality”.

For those in the corridors of power, however, Savita’s promiscuity was no laughing matter. Last month the Government ordered internet service providers to block the site. To do so it evoked section 67 of the Information Technology Act. The law allows the Government to ban websites that threaten “the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence and security of the state” or that endanger “friendly relations with foreign states”.

India’s decision to blacklist Savita while continuing to allow unfettered access to traditional hardcore pornography sites has drawn ridicule from experts in cyberspace law.

Sevanti Ninan, a journalist who runs thehoot.org, a media commentary site, said: “Our relationships with foreign states couldn’t be friendlier since she went online.”

Campaigners for Savita’s reinstatement hope to use India’s freedomof-information laws to uncover who demanded that the site be blacklisted.

Others have sought solace in the failure of other countries to police the web. The columnist Venkatesan Vembu said: “The government ban is about as impotent as Savita Bhabhi’s workaholic, sexually clueless husband, and as her growing legion of fans has discovered, there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”

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