'My Bike Plate Used To Find My Phone Number’: How Women Protestors Were Doxxed

When Shradha Singh posted a seven-second Instagram reel from Delhi's Connaught Place, she did not expect it to follow her home.

The 23-year-old yoga instructor from Madhya Pradesh had joined thousands of young people at Jantar Mantar, protesting against exam paper leaks. Like many others, she filmed a quick reel using a trending audio clip from a cleaning liquid advertisement — meant, she says, as a passing joke.

In the clip, she gestures towards two Rapid Action Force personnel in blue uniforms as the voiceover plays, "blue is for the toilet," and points to her own red t-shirt when it says, "red is for the bathroom".

"I uploaded it just for entertainment," Singh said. "The moment I realised people were taking it as disrespect, I deleted it within an hour."

The internet had already moved faster.

Within hours, troll pages recirculated the clip, framing it as an insult to the armed forces and “setting her rates"— shorthand for pricing her as a sex worker. By the next day, television channels had amplified it further. What began as a fleeting post turned into a national talking point — and a target on her back. She briefly lost her Instagram account to a fake copyright claim.

The backlash did not stay online. Users combed through her older content. Her phone number was traced through her bike registration number, visible in an earlier video, and circulated. Soon, the calls started.

"Ten to fifteen calls every day," she said. "They used filthy language. Some said they would kill me. Some said they would rape me."

She stopped answering. Eventually, she switched off the number entirely. "I don't know if the calls have stopped. I just stopped using that phone."

Today, Singh says she has lost her yoga clients over the incident. "I want to move on from this as soon as I can now," she told Decode.

When the internet follows you home

Singh's case is not an outlier. It points to a pattern taking shape in the aftermath of the month-long Gen Z-led movement at Jantar Mantar, which unfolded through July and drew sustained crowds of students and young people. What began largely as a protest against NEET exam paper leaks and broader concerns around government accountability eventually culminated in the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

In the weeks since, it is young women — protesters, bystanders, and content creators alike — who are increasingly being singled out, named and shamed, and subjected to moral policing.

Fifteen-year-old Ruchika became another face of that fallout.

Clips of her from Jantar Mantar travelled quickly. In them, she uses expletives while speaking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Soon after, a Zero FIR — one that can be filed at any police station regardless of jurisdiction — was registered against her under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita: Sections 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace), 353(1) (statements conducing to public mischief), and 356(1) (defamation).

She became the target of sustained trolling and harassment. The X handle Jaipur Dialogues escalated it further by sharing her personal details online, widening the circle of intimidation.

A day later, Ruchika appeared in an apology video — hands folded, head lowered.

"I want to apologise to the entire nation. I cannot even look up. Please forgive me," she said, calling her remarks "unforgivable" and "extremely vulgar". She added that it was her "first and last mistake".

The apology did little to slow things down.

According to her lawyer, the family has been forced to move homes multiple times. Her mother, who has remained unnamed in media reports, described the strain. "I am raising my daughter alone. My husband died in an accident in 2019, and my younger son lives with my in-laws. How can we continue living there when people and the police keep coming to our house?"

They had moved from Noida to a relative’s home in Faridabad. But as the threats persisted, they were forced to relocate again. This time to an undisclosed location. Supreme Court advocate Smriti Singh Chandel, who filed the complaint against Ruchika, has said she has requested the Delhi Police to cancel the case as the intention was to make the 15-year-old “realise their mistake” and not get her arrested.

In a video posted the same night on August 1, Prime Minister Modi described remarks by "young daughters" directed at him and his late mother as a "cultural shock". He cautioned against punitive responses, saying such young people should be "embraced, not punished," and that criminal cases alone would not address the deeper issue.

Even so, the abuse kept circulating — in many cases amplified by accounts the Prime Minister himself follows on X.

Mumbai-based model Rhiya Ahir, too, found herself at the receiving end of a similar cycle: a brief video of her standing in front of a police van carrying detained protesters circulated widely, turning her into a symbol of defiance. What followed, she alleged, was a sustained campaign of online abuse.

 Rhiya Ahir stopped the police van detaining protesters (Courtesy- @rhiyaahir)

Instagram, which once helped the Gen Z protest reach wider audiences, has in many ways turned on the very people who used it — and more often than not, it is women who find themselves at the receiving end.

Rules for some, silence for others

Far from offering support, the Meta-owned platform now appears to be working against those who documented the protest. So far, Instagram has removed 33 of Shradha's posts related to Jantar Mantar. No meaningful explanation was offered, she says, and no clear avenue for appeal.

Sakhi, a queer Delhi University student and long-time member of the Students' Federation of India (SFI), describes a similar experience. Four of their videos have been made unavailable in India for allegedly violating the IT Act. A carousel of protest photographs was flagged under "adult sexual exploitation and nudity". None of it, they say, was clearly explained, and there was little recourse to challenge it.

Among the videos taken down: one showing a truck carrying food for police personnel while students were being lathi-charged, another featuring fellow volunteer Mohammad Junaid, and a parody song on unemployment.

The carousel flagged for "nudity" documented the aftermath of the Chalo Sansad march on July 20, 2026, when Sakhi was pushed to the ground, injured, and their clothes torn in the chaos. "Still, it was nothing explicit," they said. Their appeal went unanswered. Their account now carries additional restrictions; they have been debarred from going live for nearly a year.

Sakhi's post flagged for 'nudity' (Courtesy: @sakhi.bandhu)

Sakhi had been posting from Jantar Mantar since the first day of the protests. The trolling and threats had begun almost immediately, they say, but the timing of the content takedowns felt telling. "It surged the day Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. After that, it felt systemic."

The content directed at them appeared to follow a different logic. Even as their own posts were being taken down, abusive reels and comments targeting them stayed up. Sakhi pointed to one account, run by a user named Manish Chaudhary, which they say posted queerphobic and misogynistic videos — including a line, "In chatron mein chatri daal denge" ("we'll shove umbrellas into these students"), which they read as a thinly veiled rape threat.

Sakhi reported the account. Instagram, they say, found no violation. "I have not used a single abusive word in my videos," Sakhi said. "Still, they are removed."

After Decode flagged the issue to Meta, the carousel post was restored on Sakhi’s account, and the restrictions on it were lifted.

A familiar template

Long before these protests, there was already a template.

In 2021, and again in 2022, apps like Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai surfaced online, "auctioning" Muslim women — journalists, students, artists — by scraping their photos and putting them up for public humiliation. There was no transaction, only spectacle: a way to mark, isolate, and intimidate women who were visible, outspoken, or simply present online.

What is unfolding now feels less like a rupture and more like an extension. The methods have shifted — from standalone apps to dispersed networks of accounts, from one-time "auctions" to sustained cycles of circulation — but the logic carries through. Faces are picked out, reframed, and made to travel. What begins as participation folds into exposure.

And that pattern becomes clearer when placed against how women are perceived in the first place.

Digital rights and governance expert Barsha Chakraborty said women are still not seen as political actors in their own right, but as custodians of morality—expected to stay within patriarchal boundaries. “When they speak out publicly, the backlash is sharper and more personal,” she said, especially when their views challenge dominant ideas of nationalism or “acceptable” values.

That backlash, she added, is also shaped by the platforms themselves. Algorithms don’t just reflect reality; they “build your perception,” often amplifying polarisation. In that system, hate becomes a kind of currency: “If hate is giving money, people will make hate content,” she noted, pointing to how engagement-driven models incentivise abuse.

Recourse, however, remains limited. Chakraborty said many women end up relying on groups like the Rati Foundation because platform responses fall short. Much of the content reported doesn’t even meet existing thresholds—Meta, for instance, largely defines “intimate content” as nudity.

But harm doesn’t always look like that. In many Global South contexts, she explained, intimacy is tied to dignity and social norms. “Even fully clothed images, if shared without consent and used to shame, can be deeply violating,” she said. “But platforms will not consider that as intimate content,” leaving a gap between policy and lived experience.

The outrage gets organised

The pattern of engagement on Sakhi's posts, they said, doesn't unfold randomly — it turns.

At first, their posts draw what looks like ordinary interaction: supportive comments from accounts that seem real, familiar, traceable. Then, almost on cue, the tone shifts. Abuse begins to arrive in clusters — profiles with no display pictures, no posts, no visible history. "It feels coordinated," they said, as if the post has been picked up somewhere and redirected, triggering a second wave in which hostility quickly drowns everything else out.

Their inbox follows the same rhythm. "Every minute I get a DM," they said, "half of them rape and death threats."

Sakhi's reading of this as organised is not unfounded. An August 4 report by The Print pointed to a more deliberate ecosystem behind such surges. It described an unnamed Delhi-based content creator who spent his day scanning protest videos, identifying those he saw as "opponents of Sanatan," and circulating their faces for recognition.

What followed, the report noted, was not limited to online abuse. Once identified, individuals — many of them young women — were subjected to targeted harassment that spilled offline, including visits framed as "counselling" that pressured them into issuing public apologies.

The creator described his process in explicitly methodical terms. What began, in his view, as a student protest had "turned into something else" — a space where, according to him, "anti-national" voices and participants from earlier movements had converged. He anticipated the virality of protest content and tracked it closely.

"We kept a minute-by-minute watch on X and Instagram," he said, adding that this monitoring, combined with an on-ground presence in areas like Connaught Place, helped them "identify who is who".

"Fear keeps me awake at night"

For some, that exposure narrows what comes next.

Shradha speaks of a kind of withdrawal — not as a decision, but as a recalibration. "I will not involve myself in anything else except my work from now on," she said. The immediate aftermath was marked by anxiety at home; her family alarmed, conversations turned toward caution. Things have since steadied, she added, but not without residue. "Once things settle, I'll take legal action to remove the abusive content being shared, repurposing my video."

Sakhi's response moves in a different direction, but carries its own weight. "They need to try harder to silence me," the DU student said, reading the backlash as part of a larger pattern they describe as "anti-woman and anti-minority".

They are aware, though, of the uneven ground this plays out on. "I am privileged that my parents understand this. They won't blame me for getting rape threats," they said, pausing at what that might look like for others. "For a majority of girls, this will become a deterrent. There will be pressure from families to censor themselves."

And yet, even resistance does not cancel out fear.

"I do think — what if those bad actors find me in person and do something? That fear keeps me awake at night."