What happened
At 11:16 pm on July 23, 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs' Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) sent GitHub a notice ordering it to remove three repositories belonging to BitChat — the Bluetooth-mesh messaging app built by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's team, which relays encrypted messages phone-to-phone without internet, SIM cards, or a central server. The order, issued under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021, gave GitHub three hours to disable bitchat, bitchat-android, and the Android app's release page "without vitiating the evidence in any manner" (MediaNama). GitHub complied. No copy of the order was published by the government — the public learned of it only because Dorsey posted it himself, writing that "the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down."
The trigger was Delhi. Student protesters organized under the 'Cockroach Janta Party' banner have been demonstrating at Jantar Mantar since July 20 over an exam-paper leak scandal, and authorities responded with repeated mobile internet suspensions around the protest site and parts of central Delhi. After roughly two days without connectivity, demonstrators turned to BitChat's offline mesh network to keep coordinating (MediaNama; Business Today). MHA's stated concern was that BitChat's architecture "significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation," since it has no registration, no phone numbers, and no centralized logs to subpoena.
The steelman
That concern is not manufactured. A messaging layer with no account system and no server-side logs is, by design, resistant to the kind of lawful-interception requests that undergird investigation of organized crime, terrorism financing, and — this government would argue — orchestrated unrest during a public-order emergency. Democracies elsewhere have grappled with the same tension around end-to-end encryption and mesh networking; India is not alone in worrying that a genuinely serverless protocol leaves law enforcement with no intermediary to serve process on. If the state has a good-faith, evidence-backed reason to believe a specific tool is being used to organize unlawful assembly or violence, it has a legitimate interest in disrupting that channel.
Why the mechanism matters more than the motive
What makes this case a genuine intermediary-liability problem, rather than a straightforward content-blocking dispute, is which power MHA reached for. Section 79(3)(b) is not a blocking provision — it is a safe-harbor carve-out. Its text, read on IndianKanoon, strips an intermediary's immunity if it "fails to expeditiously remove or disable access" to unlawful material after actual knowledge or government notification. It was written to define when a platform loses legal protection, not to hand the executive a freestanding takedown power. India already has a mechanism built for content blocking: Section 69A, backed by the Blocking Rules of 2009, which requires a written order, review by an Inter-Departmental Committee, and — per the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India — a standard under which intermediaries lose safe harbor only through a court order or a valid Section 69A notification, not an informal executive notice (SFLC.in). Routing this order through 79(3)(b)/Rule 3(1)(d) instead sidesteps that committee, that review, and the disclosure norms that come with it — which is exactly why the Internet Freedom Foundation called the action "unconstitutional and authoritarian" and demanded the government withdraw Notice No. 11072601011432 and publish every direction it issues under this route.
There's a second problem layered on top of the procedural one: this order didn't target unlawful content. Section 79(3)(b) is meant to compel removal of specific unlawful material — a defamatory post, an infringing file, csam. BitChat's repositories contain no illegal content; they contain a communications protocol. The order effectively asks GitHub to delete working software because of what people might say over it, which is a different and much broader kind of censorship than intermediary law was built to authorize. If unlawful coordination did happen over BitChat, the tool for that is Section 69A applied to specific access, or ordinary criminal law applied to the organizers — not erasing the codebase for every user of the app, most of whom were almost certainly using it to talk to friends 12 feet away during a network outage that has nothing to do with them.
What this sets up
GitHub hosts millions of Indian developers' repositories, many of them peer-to-peer, offline-first, or otherwise designed to work without centralized infrastructure — a legitimate and growing category of software, not a protest-tool niche. If a bare I4C notice under 79(3)(b) is sufficient to pull code within three hours, with no published order and no committee review, that precedent reaches far past BitChat. The fix is not to concede the security argument or to pretend mesh networking raises no investigative questions — it plainly does. It is to insist the government use the process Parliament and the Supreme Court actually built for blocking decisions, and to publish what it orders, so platforms, courts, and the public can tell the difference between a lawful, reviewable takedown and an executive request that skipped the review by design.