Inside The Indian State's Digital Warfare On CJP Protesters

Sadhika Tiwari's video lasted a few minutes. In it, a young woman cries as she describes what just happened to her: "We were lathicharged indiscriminately. They didn't see who they were hitting."

Tiwari, a DW reporter, had filmed the footage at the Cockroach Janta Party's march to Parliament on July 20, in one of the largest youth mobilisations India has seen in years. The clip circulated widely. Within a day, it was removed in India following a government notice under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act.

 Over a week later, "it is still blocked," Tiwari told Decode. "Other versions of the post are up," she said, "but the original video is not visible."

"As a journalist it takes a lot of effort to be there, in these situations," Tiwari added. "For your work to reach a lot of people and to create some sort of an impact is always something that we want as journalists. And when you realise that the state, for no good reason, is taking your work down, it feels frustrating."

Left In The Dark

Tiwari's experience was one of dozens. 

Mishi Choudhary, executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC.in), has been tracking and assisting people caught in this machinery. "One of the biggest problems is that users are left in the dark," she told Decode. "Whether content comes down because of a government legal request, a platform's own policies, or an automated moderation system, users often receive little or no meaningful explanation."

SFLC.in has assisted users through the appeals machinery that exists, including Meta's grievance process and the Grievance Appellate Committee. "In our experience, these processes can take weeks or months," Choudhary said.

The other option is court. "Litigation is legally possible but in practice remains unavailable for most people because of the cost and time involved. How many people can spend doing this?"

The CJP took its name from a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant, who compared unemployed young people to "cockroaches" and "parasites of society." The movement that adopted the insult was India's tech-native Gen Z. They used Instagram reels, memes, and group chats to mobilise thousands of students demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET exam-leak scandal. They used the same platforms to share evidence of police brutality on July 20.

The state fought back on the same terrain.

Stop All Comms

Journalists who arrived at Jantar Mantar ahead of the parliament march could not get word in or out, despite having full signal bars.

Calls went through, barely. Voices broke up, dropped mid-sentence. Text messages still worked. But mobile data—the thing that lets you livestream, upload a photograph, or tweet from inside a crowd—was gone.

Tiwari hit the same wall. "The internet there was really choppy," she said. 

On July 20, the CJP's own handle posted that people near the protest site were getting a text message: "As per government instructions, internet services had been stopped in the area until further notice. REGINF."

News reports described people walking nearly two kilometres just to make a call or load a page. The Delhi Metro shut somewhere between sixteen and eighteen stations. For a while, the two easiest ways of reaching the protest—physically and digitally—were closed at the same time.

Full signal bars with no data is a specific signature. It rules out jamming (which kills bars too) and points to a targeted suspension order from the government to telecom providers. But no such order has been published.

The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) condemned the shutdown. "No suspension order has been made public," it said.

Telecom companies confirmed to The Wire that they received government instructions to block mobile internet in central Delhi on July 20. IFF filed RTI applications seeking copies of the suspension orders and review committee records. None have surfaced.

In 2020, in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, the Supreme Court ruled that shutdown orders must be published, must carry reasons, and must be open to challenge in court. The Delhi shutdown met none of those conditions.

India recorded 65 internet shutdowns in 2025, the highest of any democracy in the world.

Since 2016, the country accounts for 920 of the 2,102 shutdowns documented globally by the Access Now #KeepItOn coalition. Delhi has been here before: mobile services were suspended during the anti-CAA protests in December 2019, and during the farmers' Republic Day tractor rally in January 2021.

The CJP shutdown was the latest entry in that record. Like many before it, it came without a paper trail.

Going After The Code

The CJP movement was organised entirely online, and its supporters knew their way around apps. Cutting the internet sent them looking for alternatives.

They found Bitchat.

Built by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter co-founder, Bitchat passes encrypted messages phone to phone over Bluetooth through a mesh network. No central server, no phone number, no login, no dependency on a telecom provider. The app had surged in Nepal in September 2025, in Indonesia, and in Madagascar, each time among protesters facing internet blackouts. China's Cyberspace Administration reportedly ordered Apple to pull it in April 2026.

As it gained traction among CJP protesters, the Indian state went after it too.

On the night of July 23, at 11:16 pm, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre gave GitHub three hours to disable access to three Bitchat repositories.

The order said Bitchat "significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation by law enforcement agencies." Decentralised platforms like it, the notice went on, "are capable of being exploited for coordinating unlawful assemblies, violent protests, dissemination of misinformation, radicalisation, criminal conspiracies, and other activities prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India."

The order did not point to any specific illegal content. It targeted the app's architecture—the fact that it allowed private communication without routing through servers that authorities could tap.

No public announcement accompanied the order either. It came to light only after Dorsey posted a screenshot on X. "the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down," he wrote.

The Bitchat episode "shows that an order affecting millions of users might never have entered the public domain had its famous recipient Dorsey not chosen to disclose it," Choudhary said. SFLC.in has challenged the confidentiality provisions that allow this in the Supreme Court.

Her organisation also disputed the legal basis. The provision cited, Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act—the same one used against Tiwari's video—does not confer the power to block content at all. That power sits in Section 69A, which requires a review committee and a paper trail. Section 79(3)(b) requires neither.

Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch showed India accounted for 85% of Bitchat's global downloads between July 17 and July 23, up from roughly 1% in the previous month. Downloads jumped 32-fold on July 19 alone. By July 24, daily active users in India had crossed 330,000. On the App Store, the app climbed from No. 46 to No. 7 among social networking apps in four days.

Open-source code, it turns out, is hard to delete. The repositories were cloned, passed around, and mirrored. Whether GitHub complied with the three-hour deadline remains unclear. As of publication, the app was still available on both Apple and Google app stores.

Responding to Decode's queries, GitHub did not clarify whether it acted on the order. "When we receive a complete government takedown request, we notify the affected account owners and give them an opportunity to appeal," a spokesperson said.

"We share every government takedown request we take action on publicly," they added, pointing to the company's public repository of government takedowns. It made no mention of Bitchat.

The Takedown Queue

Tiwari's video was one entry in a much longer list.

CJP spokesperson Saurav Das had a post withheld under a Section 69A order after it alleged that a minor girl was assaulted during the July 20 lathi charge. His WhatsApp account was also blocked around the same period. Meta later reportedly acknowledged that its automated systems had made an error.

Maktoob Media's Hindi video vanished behind a notice reading: "Your post is unavailable in India. We restricted access to this content through an automated system implemented pursuant to legal requirements under India's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules."

Actor Naseeruddin Shah's video criticising the crackdown was pulled and his account removed, then restored, The Wire reported. The CJP's own Instagram account disappeared and came back.

The Economic Times reported users complaining that Meta was shadowbanning protest content and throttling reach. Creators posted screenshots of stories deleted for unspecified guideline violations and footage blurred as "sensitive."

Content creator Naman Shrivastava, whose account was restricted, told followers where to find him. "No words," he wrote. "P.S. Algorithm will now restrict the reach. Follow on YouTube, Threads, and alternate pages."

The IFF demanded Meta publish the government orders it was acting on and restore content that broke no stated policy.

Almost none of these takedowns came with an explanation. Section 79(3)(b) was being invoked across cases—from Tiwari's protest footage to Bitchat's source code—but as Choudhary pointed out, it does not authorise content blocking. The provision designed for that is Section 69A, which requires a documented process and a review committee. The government appeared to be routing around its own safeguards.

"Every restriction on online speech should as a default come with clear notice to the affected user, clear reasons and legal basis for the action, and an effective opportunity to challenge it before an independent forum," Choudhary said. "Not courts—but quick, easy remedy."

"Platforms don't tell anything, law is cryptic, and users are left hanging dry."

Tiwari's video survived in a roundabout way. Someone downloaded it, reposted it, and later added her as a collaborator. That version remains up. The original is still blocked.

Calling Real Videos Fake

Having cut the connection, taken down what got through, and watched the crowd with facial recognition vans and drones, the state then told people that what they had seen had not happened.

Videos of officers using batons, tear gas, and pellet-loaded shotguns had gone viral, several later verified by BOOM. Delhi Police and PIB Fact Check took to the same platforms to insist none of it was real.

On July 20, Delhi Police posted that "some segments from media have mentioned sporadic use of violence/detentions at Jantar Mantar by Delhi Police. It is informed that no such incident has taken place and protest is being handled professionally."

The public was asked "not to fall prey to any rumour/misgivings."

PIB Fact Check took a video of batons fitted with nails and marked it false. "Social media posts are circulating a video claiming that batons fitted with nails were used against protesters in Delhi. #PIBFactCheck: This claim is #Fake," it posted, telling people to "always rely on official sources for verified information."

The video was real. BOOM traced it to Upendra Gaur, a UPSC aspirant who filmed it near Gate No. 3 of Janpath Metro Station at 4:33 pm on July 20. Metadata and GPS coordinates matched the location and time.

"When the police were beating the protesters, we noticed that one of the batons had nails fitted into it," Gaur told BOOM. "We also saw some girls who had been injured." BOOM could not independently verify who fitted the nails or whether the baton struck anyone. But the footage was authentic.

The pellet guns followed the same script. Photos and videos of protesters with what appeared to be pellet wounds spread in the days after July 20. Delhi Police declared the reports "completely false and misleading," and later that the force "neither possess pellet guns nor do they use them in the ongoing protest." PIB Fact Check amplified the claim.

Sheikh Irshad Mansuri, 25, from Jabalpur and working in Gurugram, was in the ENT ward at Lady Hardinge Medical College at the time of these denials.

"That's when I saw an RAF personnel in blue uniform holding a weapon," he told BOOM. "He pointed the barrel of the gun towards my face and suddenly fired."

Three pellets lodged in him. One in his neck. One near his nose. One in the muscle of his right eye, which stopped moving for a time. Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda visited him in hospital, while the government's own fact-checking unit was telling the country the weapon that put him there had not been fired.

A week later, a CRPF inquiry confirmed what the government had been denying. An RAF jawan deployed at Connaught Place on July 20 had fired at least seven rounds from his pellet gun, five of which hit protesters. This was despite personnel having been directed not to use pellet guns at the Jantar Mantar deployment at all.

A separate inquiry found that at least a dozen RAF personnel had been issued pellet guns on the morning of July 20 before heading to the protest site. The RAF stopped issuing them from July 23, after the allegations surfaced. Sources told the Indian Express the rounds were fired after protesters attacked security personnel and began pelting stones.

PIB Fact Check has not retracted its claims.

What Won. What Didn't.

Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25. By one measure, the Cockroach Janta Party won.

However, there is still no published shutdown order for central Delhi. Tiwari's video is still blocked. The Bitchat takedown order has no legal standing confirmed or denied by a court.

Meanwhile, in the days of the sit-in protest at Jantar Mantar leading up to July 20, the police had been running excessive surveillance on the protesters round the clock using completely unregulated technology. The cameras and smart glasses that tracked the march didn't switch off once it was over. SFI and CPI(M) leader Aishe Ghosh, who had watched that apparatus grow through the protest, took it to the Delhi High Court.

Her petition has seen hearings postponed repeatedly—Ghosh says the state's counsel has not been appearing. "As days pass, more surveillance is happening, more data getting collected," she told Decode. "And no hearing is happening."

And there is still no law governing facial recognition, no retention policy for the faces collected at Jantar Mantar over 35 days.

"It's not an isolated case," Ghosh said. "It's how the government, the state wants to capture data and they want to utilise this data to target individuals."

For Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation, even a flawless version of the surveillance machinery would not fix the underlying problem.

"Even if, for a second, I accept the hypothetical that there is a high amount of accuracy and it's 100 percent to 100 percent match, even then the right to protest is constitutionally protected," he said. "It is being done in a peaceful assembly. It will lead to a chilling effect in which people will be trying to cover their identification features or will be prevented from joining the protest."

For Choudhary, the pattern that ran through every layer of the crackdown—from the unpublished shutdown order to the unexplained takedowns to the unchallenged fact-checks—comes down to one thing. "Every restriction on online speech," she said, should come with "clear notice, clear reasons, and an effective opportunity to challenge it."

What actually happened during the CJP protest did not meet that standard.

Tiwari, for her part, has stopped waiting for the platform. She has engaged a lawyer and filed an RTI with the Union Home Ministry, seeking the total number of takedown notices routed through the Sahyog portal and the number of central and state officials authorised to issue them. Lawyers, she said, are also bunching similar takedown cases together to challenge them.

Among numerous other protest videos, why did Tiwari's video—void of any disturbing visuals—get taken down? "I think it really evoked empathy," Tiwari noted. "You looked at this girl crying and the way she was talking, you could relate to her."

However, for her, getting the video back up is not of priority, but rather to establish why it was taken down. "What we are trying to achieve by this entire process is to establish factually that they took it down just because they didn't want people to see this side of the protesters, or feel empathy for them."

Delhi Police did not respond to Decode's request for comment. Meta is yet to respond to detailed queries on the government orders it acted on and the content it restricted. This article will be updated upon receiving their responses.