Of trolls, censors, and patriots

Hello all,

Happy 80th Independence Day, folks! One heck of a journey it has been for the country. As is expected with an octogenarian, she is acting up a bit, but hey, she has great bones and greater resilience and we are all proud of her!

Now, let's give a hearty welcome to our new subscribers who have recently joined the DoorDesi clan! 🎊🎉You are among friends! 😄

Finally, as promised last week, I leaned heavily in the tech stories direction because there is a lot happening in India around tech infrastructure, online safety, and censorship that directly affect the lives of people back home. To be fair there, is a lot happening globally in that space that directly affects everyone but one thing at a time.

So let's get to it. But before we do, Vande Mataram! 🇮🇳

Just the gist

🔗 BitChat's rise in India, courtesy censorship

We covered India's Telegram ban a while back, when the government blocked an entire platform ahead of the NEET re-exam. This is the next chapter in that same fight, but goes a step further.

During last month's localised internet shutdown at Jantar Mantar during the CJP-student protests, protesters turned to Bitchat, an app built by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that lets nearby phones communicate with each other over Bluetooth, even without mobile network or internet. That is the whole point of it. It uses what is called a mesh network, meaning there is no central server anywhere to shut down. As long as people are physically close enough to each other, the app keeps working, internet blackout or not.

Internet shutdowns have become one of the most common tools governments use worldwide to suppress protests, precisely because they stop real-time communication and make it harder for the outside world to see what is actually happening on the ground. Apps like Bitchat are specifically designed to defeat that tactic. So, Bitchat hit 430,000 daily active users in India on July 26, with India accounting for 74% of the app's global downloads in that single week. This mass adoption event was triggered directly by the shutdown itself.

But the government's response was the cherry on top. Rather than just trying to block the app from app stores, like a normal repressive government, which India has done before with other apps, the government ordered GitHub, the Microsoft-owned platform where Bitchat's underlying source code is stored, to disable access to three Bitchat repositories within three hours. Digital rights advocates say this appears to be the first known attempt by any government to geoblock an entire open-source code repository.

Jack Dorsey posted the government's order directly on X, saying plainly: "The government of India does not like technologies like Bitchat and wants it taken down." And the best part is, without that GitHub order becoming public and Dorsey tweeting about it, this whole episode would have stayed confined to a small circle of tech policy people. Instead, the attempt to suppress the app turned it into global news and almost certainly drove more downloads than it prevented. The repositories are still accessible in India and have already been mirrored onto decentralised platforms specifically to make them harder to remove entirely.

➡️ India has increasingly been targeting how communication platforms are designed, not just what content moves through them. The Telegram ban in June and the stalled rollout of WhatsApp's username feature in July both fit this same pattern. Any tool that lets two people communicate can, in principle, be used for something illegal. That has always been true of phones, email, and encrypted messaging generally. Using that logic to justify blocking entire pieces of infrastructure, including the open-source code underlying them, is a new and more aggressive form of digital control, and it is worth watching closely regardless of which specific app it is aimed at next.

🔗 The price is always paid by women

The ripple effect of the July Jantar Mantar protests are still being felt. Within three days of the protests officially ending on July 25, a coordinated set of accounts began circulating cropped and AI-fabricated images specifically targeting women who had participated. Not the men. Only the women. One protester, a 23-year-old who had posted a light-hearted reel, had it recaptioned by anonymous accounts as an attack on the armed forces and picked up by national news channels. From an old photo of her car, users derived what they claimed was her phone number and home address. She then received calls threatening rape and murder. Her mother was tracked down and pressured for her location. Most of the accounts doing this had no posts and no followers of their own, which is a strong signal of coordination rather than organic outrage. She has stopped leaving her house.

The most serious case involves a minor we have all probably heard of. A 15-year-old girl, whose identity was deliberately exposed online alongside sexualised commentary and a fabricated "wanted" poster. I am not naming her here, and no responsible outlet should, because Indian law under the Juvenile Justice Act specifically prohibits disclosing a child's identity in these circumstances, and that law applies equally to a national broadcaster and to an anonymous account. Six FIRs were subsequently registered against the child herself in Noida. A group then went to her home demanding a recorded apology, which a national news channel broadcast the next day. A day before that, someone identifying himself as a state-level social media coordinator for a political party had posted a video naming three women protesters and telling followers to identify them and file complaints! If you ever wondered what the 1700s looked like during the witch hunt... wonder no more. Here is your modern day witch hunt. Misogyny is alive and well.

It gets worse because as of 14/08/2026, no FIR has been filed against a single person who published these women's personal information, issued death and rape threats, or fabricated their images. The law here is not ambiguous or a grey area. Stalking, criminal intimidation, insults to modesty, and communal targeting are all clearly defined offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and IT Act provisions cover identity misuse and non-consensual sexualised images specifically. Under a Supreme Court ruling from years ago, police are legally required to register an FIR the moment a complaint discloses a cognisable offence. That legal obligation exists. It has apparently not been acted on here, even as FIRs were filed swiftly against the targetted minor herself.

The Internet Freedom Foundation has now formally asked the National Commission for Women to independently take notice of the coordinated harassment, summon the relevant police officers to explain why no FIRs have been registered, and review whether women protesters have been unfairly charged simply for memes, slogans, or criticism of the government. They have made parallel requests to the child rights commission specifically regarding the minor involved, including a call to prosecute the accounts and broadcaster that disclosed her identity, and to issue formal guidance to media organisations about their legal obligations when reporting on protests involving children.

➡️ Here is why I wanted you to see the full arc of this rather than just the outcome we celebrated a few weeks ago. A hunger strike ended, a minister resigned, and that felt like a genuine win worth marking. But movements do not end cleanly for everyone who take part in them, and the people who often pay the longest-lasting price are not the visible leaders but the ordinary participants, particularly women and minorities. The stated goal of this kind of coordinated doxxing is straightforward: to make every young woman who might consider showing up to the next protest do the math on what it could cost her personally.

🔗 India's AI data centre boom has a water problem

I want to highlight this issue because I think it is one of the more consequential stories developing right now that has not gotten the attention it deserves outside of a few local newsrooms. But the impact will be felt by generations to come.

India is positioning itself as a global hub for AI infrastructure. Modi personally urged tech companies at the February AI Impact Summit to let their data "reside in India." Data centres got infrastructure status back in 2022, and this year's Union Budget added a tax holiday running until 2047 for eligible foreign cloud providers.

Two of the biggest projects are Google's $15 billion data centre hub in Visakhapatnam, built in partnership with Adani (because who else?) and expected to create up to 188,000 jobs, and Amazon's 53 to 58 acre hyperscale facility in Thane, Maharashtra. Both are now facing organised local resistance, among the first of their kind in India.

The companies involved are, at least on paper, responding to concerns rather than ignoring them entirely. Google says it commissioned independent environmental audits during planning and will use advanced air cooling specifically to avoid straining local water supplies, alongside noise mitigation and erosion control measures. Amazon claims it does not use water for cooling in any of its Indian data centres at all, and that its approved water permit for Thane is a tiny 0.01 million litres a day, strictly for staff drinking water and restrooms. If these claims hold up under independent verification, they represent a truly different approach from the water-intensive cooling systems that have caused real problems elsewhere in the world. But how likely are they to hold up under scrutiny, really?

The Andhra Pradesh High Court has taken up a public interest litigation and will hear it again on August 24. Multiple cases have also been filed at India's environmental court. The state government has publicly committed to engaging with "legitimate" concerns rather than dismissing protesters outright.

Now onto the murky bit. Visakhapatnam receives 410 million litres of water daily against a requirement of 480 million, and rationing is already common for the city's 2.5 million residents. The state government has reportedly promised the Google project "guaranteed" water supply for 20 years, in a city that cannot currently meet its own residents' needs. In Thane, residents point out that their neighbourhood already survives on tanker water, and are asking why a massive facility is being built in a dense residential area at all. Both cities also flagged that data centres are classified as "essential services," which raises the real possibility they receive priority access to water and electricity during shortages that residents themselves are already living through.

India still has no binding national policy for data centre development. The Ministry of Electronics and IT released a draft policy back in 2020 that never became binding law. Sixteen states have instead built their own individual policies or incentive schemes, and only five of those states have bothered to include sustainability requirements at all. The Environment Ministry's own parliamentary response confirms this gap. AI data centres do not require standalone environmental clearance unless they cross specific size thresholds tied to construction footprint, not water or energy consumption. A facility can be environmentally significant in water and power terms while remaining below the threshold that triggers real scrutiny.

Individual state governments defend individual projects when challenged, courts hear individual cases when filed, companies respond to individual questionnaires when residents organise. What is missing is a national policy that mandates disclosure of energy and water use, sets phased efficiency standards, and requires siting decisions to actually account for local water and grid availability before approval, not after protest. Other countries already do versions of this. The EU mandates water and energy reporting above certain thresholds. China caps water use relative to energy load. Singapore and Malaysia tie project approval directly to efficiency and water metrics. India has none of this as binding national policy right now. New York has already imposed a one-year moratorium on large data centre construction over exactly these concerns. Dublin and Frankfurt have tightened operational controls.

➡️ AI infrastructure investment is could be valuable for India's economy and technological standing. But right now, the decision of where that infrastructure gets built, and who absorbs the water and land cost of it, is happening state by state, incentive by incentive, without the kind of binding national framework that would actually protect the communities living next to these facilities.

🔗 The Meta-stisis of social media and censorship

Between July and December 2025, Meta restricted over 41,000 pieces of content in India, nearly triple the number from the year before. This is a dramatic escalation in a single six-month window. 23,000 individual posts, over 3,200 profiles, and hundreds of comments, pages, and groups, all restricted on Facebook alone, plus over 10,500 pieces of media and 3,540 accounts on Instagram. The recent numbers, post Meta's public apology for taking down a post by PM Modi, are yet to be published. Brace yourselves.

This is not a case of extremist content or misinformation being removed. Freelance journalists, Alt News co-founder Mohammad Zubair, media organisations like Scroll and The Hindu, the Aam Aadmi Party's official account, Arvind Kejriwal, and multiple CJP leaders have all had posts restricted. Scroll's post about pellet gun victims in Kashmir not receiving compensation a decade after their injuries was made unavailable on Instagram, with a second, less graphic post about the same story restricted too, and no specific reason given. The Hindu's post about Insha Mushtaq, blinded by pellet guns during the 2016 Kashmir protests, was restricted the same way. CJP co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka had four posts taken down, including one about a food video and one relaying an SOS call during Sonam Wangchuk's detention. Ranka also noted that when a new CJP regional zone head was announced, his personal Instagram and Facebook accounts were suspended almost immediately afterward.

The pattern here speaks for itself: journalists reporting on state violence in Kashmir, and organisers connected to a protest movement that just won a genuine political victory, and fact-checkers, getting disproportionately targeted by the same takedown mechanism.

Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act is what platforms rely on for "safe harbour," meaning legal immunity from liability for what their users post, on the condition that they comply with government takedown notices. Losing that immunity would expose Meta and X to direct legal liability for anything unlawful on their platforms. And who would fear that more than a company that has been accussed of being complicit in an actual genocide.

Users are not told why their content was removed, have no meaningful way to challenge the decision, and platforms must now comply within three hours of receiving a notice. X actually challenged this entire mechanism in court, arguing it effectively bypasses the safeguards Section 69A is supposed to guarantee, which is blocking online information only on specific grounds to protect national security, sovereignty, public order, or integrity. The Karnataka High Court dismissed that challenge in September 2025, ruling that platforms operating in India are simply subject to India's regulatory framework.

➡️ If you follow independent Indian journalism, fact-checkers, or opposition political content on social media on social media from abroad, you are unlikely to see anything change because these regulations apply only within India. But when you forward those posts to your friends or family in India, they'll tell you they cannot access it. It is a legal mechanism specifically designed to leave you and the poster both in the dark about what actually happened and why. The system is functioning exactly as intended: fast, largely unaccountable, and nearly impossible to meaningfully challenge in real time.

A quick editorial note: this reporting comes from Newslaundry, which I have relied on and cited before, and which I think does genuinely important accountability journalism. I also know there has been some ongoing public controversy involving the outlet that I do not have full clarity on myself. I am sharing this story because I believe the reporting itself is solid and important, not as an endorsement of everything about the organisation. Worth doing your own reading if you want the fuller context there, and I would rather be upfront about that than pretend I have not seen the discourse.

🔗 The 'going to nature before Adani arrives' trend is painfully real

On August 8, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced that the state plans to formally shrink the eco-sensitive zone around Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve from 10 kilometres down to 1 kilometre. The proposal will be sent to the Centre within two months. Online, this immediately became a story about a 90% cut to a protective wildlife buffer, and understandably triggered alarm, given that Kaziranga is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the last strongholds of the one-horned rhinoceros.

The thing, however, is that there has never actually been a finalised, Kaziranga-specific eco-sensitive zone. The 10 km figure is a default set by a 2022 Supreme Court order, which applies automatically to any protected area that has not completed its own formal notification process, which Kaziranga never has. So the 10 km buffer is legally binding right now, but it has functioned as a placeholder. What Assam is proposing is to finally run that formal process, and to set the resulting number at 1 km when it does, citing the same Supreme Court order as its legal basis. Sarma has also been explicit that part of the motivation is freeing up land for infrastructure projects outside the park, including a proposed stadium.

Conservationists say that a number on a map was never really the thing keeping Kaziranga's wildlife safe. What actually protects the park is whether the wider ecological landscape around it, particularly the river catchments and wildlife corridors connecting the floodplain to the Karbi Anglong hills, stays intact, since animals like rhinos and elephants move between these areas seasonally regardless of which zone they happen to be standing in. And that wider landscape is already under documented pressure with alleged construction inside protected wildlife corridors, hundreds of vehicles regularly washing in hill streams that feed directly into the park's floodplain, and mechanised sand mining reported in at least one of those same streams this year.

One of the specific development projects fuelling this pressure is a luxury hotel being built at Ingle Pathar, a village directly adjoining Kaziranga. Activist Pranab Doley has been leading protests against that project. He was arrested on July 12, with police alleging he trespassed onto the construction site with "deadly weapons" during a demonstration. He was granted bail on July 29, and the judge's written order stated that the dispute stemmed from "a deep-rooted anxiety regarding environmental degradation" affecting local tea tribe communities, and stated plainly that "in matters where ecological preservation intersects with indigenous survival, the standard apparatus of criminal law cannot be used to suppress local anxieties. True public order is achieved not by silencing the affected, but by listening to them."

The very next day, the Assam government invoked the National Security Act against Doley, a move that overrides the bail order entirely. He remains in detention regardless of what the court decided. The government's justification cites 13 separate cases against him, allegations of inciting hatred and communal violence (rich coming from a state government that has been riding the communal car for long), and separately accuses him of... you guessed it... FOREIGN FUNDING!

➡️ The eco-sensitive zone reduction and the Ingle Pathar hotel project are the same development pressure on the same landscape, playing out through two different mechanisms, one a formal government notification process, the other a resort project that has already produced protest, arrest, and now preventive detention. A sessions court explicitly found that the criminal justice system was the wrong tool to use against someone raising legitimate ecological and indigenous-rights concerns. The state's response was to reach for one of the strongest detention powers available specifically to keep him confined anyway. Whatever you ultimately think about where Kaziranga's buffer zone should sit once the formal process concludes, how the state has chosen to treat the person most visibly raising these concerns on the ground tells you something important about the actual balance of power in this landscape right now, and how our elected leaders (do not) value lives - human or otherwise.

I hope this issue gave you added perspective on the biggest stories currently developing in India. If it did, please send this to 5 of your friends who you think would also like to join the tribe.

See you next week!

Love, S.