An eight-hour blackout, no visible paper trail
On July 20, 2026 — the opening day of Parliament's monsoon session — mobile internet was suspended in parts of central Delhi, including the area around Jantar Mantar and Sansad Marg, as thousands joined the Cockroach Janta Party's 'Chalo Sansad' march demanding the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Airtel, Jio and Vi confirmed to reporters that they had received government instructions to cut data in the area; services were reportedly blocked from around 10am and restored by roughly 6pm (News9live). What no one has produced, as of this writing, is the order itself. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) says no suspension order was published by the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Department of Telecommunications, the Delhi government, or the Delhi Police, and that no reasons were placed on record despite what IFF describes as little to no evidence of violence (The Wire; The Week).
What the law actually requires
This is not a gray area. In Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (January 10, 2020), the Supreme Court held that any restriction on internet access must be temporary, necessary and proportionate, that indefinite suspension is impermissible, and — critically — that suspension orders must be published so they can be reviewed by a court (Supreme Court of India judgment). The government's own Telecommunications (Temporary Suspension of Services) Rules, 2024 — notified November 22, 2024, replacing the 2017 rules — codify this further: a competent authority must record reasons in writing, specify the geographic area and services affected, cap any single order at 15 days, and route it to a review committee within five days (Department of Telecommunications, Rules 2024 PDF). IFF's statement is blunt about the gap: "The order is unpublished, in breach of Anuradha Bhasin and the Suspension Rules, 2024 alike" (The Wire).
The steelman
It's worth taking the government's likely position seriously before dismissing it. A fast-moving crowd converging on Parliament on the day it reconvenes is exactly the scenario public-order rules are meant to cover, and the disruption here was narrow by the standards of India's shutdown history: mobile data only, a few localities, and roughly eight hours — well inside the 15-day ceiling the 2024 Rules allow, and short enough that a full public consultation process would have been moot by the time it concluded. If the state genuinely believed real-time video and coordination apps were being used to organize confrontations with police as protesters were being cleared, a short, geographically bounded data cut is a far cry from the weeks-long, region-wide blackouts Kashmir saw in 2019.
Why the shortness doesn't cure the illegality
But proportionality was never the only test Bhasin set, and it isn't the one Delhi failed. The point of publishing an order is that it is the only way anyone — a journalist, a protester, a court — can test whether the eight hours were actually proportionate, whether the geographic scope matched a real threat, or whether an unnamed official simply decided that a protest embarrassing the government was reason enough to go dark. An unpublished order cannot be challenged, appealed, or reviewed by the very committee the 2024 Rules created to check it. That is not a technicality; it is the entire safeguard. A short shutdown implemented through a process that evades review sets a more dangerous precedent than a long one implemented transparently, because it teaches every state and city police force that the paperwork is optional as long as the disruption is brief and telecom companies comply quietly.
Part of a pattern, not an aberration
Delhi's blackout did not happen in a policy vacuum. Access Now's 2025 #KeepItOn tally recorded 65 internet shutdowns in India that year — the highest total of any democracy globally, even as India's absolute count fell from earlier peaks (Access Now, "Internet Shutdowns 2025"). Six years after Bhasin was supposed to make unpublished, unreviewable shutdowns a thing of the past, the default response to a protest at the seat of government was still to cut data first and skip the order entirely.
The fix is procedural, not aspirational
Peopleofinternet's editorial position is not that authorities can never restrict connectivity during unrest — genuine, narrowly tailored emergency measures have a place. But the 2024 Rules already provide the template: publish the order, name the authority, record the reasons, let the review committee do its job within five days. None of that happened here. Until the Ministry of Home Affairs or Delhi Police produce the order IFF is asking for, this shutdown sits outside the law the government itself wrote — and every unpublished repeat further hollows out a Supreme Court precedent that was supposed to have settled this six years ago.