In the midst of protests across the nation regarding the new upcoming citizenship laws in India, a major internet provider called Airtel said in a now-deleted tweet that the government ordered mobile internet, voice and SMS services to be suspended in certain parts of the country's capital, New Delhi.
This is alarming because it shows that the country's government is restricting citizens' efforts to express their views on many issues that are plaguing India now and limiting their ability to coordinate protests.
The news follows the start of protests in several cities and towns against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). At the same time, Section 144 of India's Criminal Procedure Code has been imposed in cities like Bengaluru and parts of New Delhi. This effectively bans the assembly of four or more people in an area, and those who participate in an "unlawful assembly" can be booked for rioting.
It is also worth noting that this happened precisely when the Delhi government had planned to roll out free Wi‑Fi services across the whole city of New Delhi.
The NRC is a bill to create a database of citizens who can prove their citizenship with official documents that verify their origin in India. It is currently being implemented only in the northeastern state of Assam, which hosts many ethnic communities.
The CAA is a law that allows the government to fast-track citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Parsi, Buddhist and Christian immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, but not Muslims and not people from other neighboring countries such as Sri Lanka and Tibet.
Together, these two pieces of legislation could see many Muslims displaced from India, where it is incredibly difficult to document origins .
Additionally, protests are taking place with demonstrators from two prominent universities, where police have reportedly resorted to violence.
India has implemented over 350 internet shutdowns across the country since 2014 – the most significant being the ongoing blackout in the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir, which has lasted for 135 days (it now operates only in the Kashmir Valley). The aforementioned shutdown came after the central government announced its intention to revoke Jammu & Kashmir’s special constitutional status, forcing it to comply with national law.
The Bhartiya Janata Party, which is currently in power in India, is going beyond anything that has ever happened in recent history, restricting citizens' freedom of expression. The current shutdown of mobile internet in the capital is only an indication of what will happen in the short term in the rest of the country.
