India’s government has said that it no longer plans to block Twitter in eight of its states, following trouble last month which sparked a mass exodus of north-easterners from southern parts of the country, driven in part by panic and rumors spread via the microblogging platform.

Twitter had been blamed by India’s government for spreading content that was likely to “inflame Muslims to target people of north-eastern ethnicity” following recent violence in the state of Assam, according to an earlier report on ZDNet.

Last month, India’s government blocked more than 250 websites that were said to contain content that could offend Muslims, just days after it announced a ban on bulk SMS and MMS messages. These steps were taken in order to prevent violence, following widespread rumours that Muslims were set to go on a rampage after the Eid-ul-Fitr Festival, which marks the end of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.

India, which is ranked sixth in the world by number of Twitter users, had wanted to block the site in eight of its provinces, including Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, but in the end the move proved to be entirely unfeasible.

The country’s Home Ministry, which is responsible for internal security in the country, had apparently gone ahead and issued orders to the country’s Department of Telecom to shut down Twitter, only to be told that such a measure was simply “impossible”. This followed earlier rebuttals from a number of independent telecom operators in the country which all said the same thing.

Several senior politicians were also against the move, with ZDNet reporting that the prime minister’s office likened the act to shutting off the entire water supply, just because a few taps were broken.

Instead of banning Twitter, India is now hoping to set up a committee to monitor the content on the site, together with other popular websites that might be used to incite violence.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh explained the threat in a press conference yesterday:

“Increase in communal incidents in the country in the past few months and the revival of ethnic tensions in the northeast  in recent weeks have been particular causes of concern to all of us. We need to fully understand how these new media are used by miscreants. We also need to devise strategies to counter the propaganda that is carried out by these new means.”