You are right. FTA: Last year, India passed a law that makes companies responsible for user content posted on their websites, requiring them to take down anything deemed offensive (”ethnically objectionable,” “blasphemous,” or “grossly harmful.”) within 36 hours in case of a complaint.

The only difference is that the exact definition of offensive content is not clear.

Interesting. Unfortunately, its even more harmful than DMCA. Resolving copyright violations is really easy. However, if I praise Richard Dawnkins in my blog and some religious retard finds that offensive then it should be taken down because it can be deemed as "blasphemous". Who will decide what is good and what is offensive? It will lead to extremely messy situation.

"Resolving copyright violations is really easy"

I think may be slightly off here. Some cases of copyright violation are quite blatent, but many others become tricky.

Music companies have been known to file DMCA complaints over content that their own PR-branches filed for publicity. Other times there is the question of derivative work and whether it is fair use, authorized, or in violation. For that matter, when talking about older works, something can be under copyright in one country but in the public domain in another, depending on their copyright term.

In contast, with the question of what is offensive, it matters greatly on who you ask. All but the most banal and obvious facts will likely offend someone.

I should have mentioned, compared to resolving whether content is religiously offensive or not copyright violations are easier to deal with. And with digital signatures it can be detected by algorithms too. But your point is valid too.

It's not mentioned in the article, but I'm curious if there is any notification to the users that posted the content, or any recourse to have that content reinstated. Is anyone familiar with Indian law?

In the case of Google it would be pretty hard to give users notifications, because Google pulls the content automatically, without the users having a Google account, without a reliable standard that Google can use to get some email address or something it can send a message to.

The best they could do is to send notifications to the email address set in Google's Webmaster Tools. This way notifications may be received by at least the webmasters that are aware that their content may get banned.

The worst part about this is that this creates yet another precedent. So Google threatening to pull out of China and then moving to Hong Kong was all for nothing if they end up censoring websites in India.