The state treats the internet as a switch it owns

Indian shutdowns are usually state- or district-level, not a single nationwide cut. That makes them easy to dismiss as local — and easier to repeat. In 2024, people in 16 states and territories were hit; Manipur (21), Haryana (12), and Jammu & Kashmir (12) led. [6] Of those 84 incidents, 41 were protest-related and 23 tied to communal violence. [6] In 2025, 12 states and territories still saw shutdowns during protests, conflict, communal violence, and religious holidays. [4] [5]

Access Now’s STOP dataset (920 India rows, 2016–2025) shows the habit in the grain of the data: 555 incidents hit a single city, county, or village; 512 were ordered by a state government and 276 by local government. [35] SFLC.in’s separate tracker — running since 2012 — puts Jammu & Kashmir at 449 cumulative shutdowns, the highest of any Indian jurisdiction, inside a national total of 930 (live counters move; these figures are from my archived copy). [7] [19]

Governments often justify shutdowns as public safety — including preventing “misinformation” and hate speech. Access Now’s KeepItOn reporting treats those stated reasons as frequently disproportionate or ineffective covers for control. [30]

The STOP ledger itself records the gap between stated justification and coded cause. Of India’s 920 deliberate shutdowns since 2016, authorities cited “fake news / hate speech / incendiary content / promoting violence” in 283 cases — more than any other justification category. Access Now’s coders marked the actual cause in those same rows as communal violence in 115 cases and protests in 81. Another 225 shutdowns were justified as public safety / restoring order. [35]

Ethnographic research on an Indian shutdown (published in the International Journal of Communication) found the opposite of the official story: cutting the network removed verification and fact-checking tools. People still received rumours by phone and word of mouth — without the means to check them. The author concludes the shutdown “succeeded in increasing the spread of misinformation and reduced the agency to counteract it.” [27]

That is the paradox of entitlement: silence the channel, then blame the dark for the rumours that grow in it.

Cutting mobile data is only one tool. The other is compelling intermediaries. Section 69A of the IT Act is the older, more procedurally constrained blocking route. Section 79(3)(b) — accelerated through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal (October 2024) — pushes faster takedown notices to platforms. [13] RTI data showed 130 Sahyog notices between October 2024 and early April 2025; related disclosures cited 426 §79(3)(b) notices covering over one lakh pieces of content in a broader year. [14] A later SFLC.in RTI reply counted 179 Sahyog-portal requests to intermediaries across the window they asked about. [40] X called Sahyog a “censorship portal.” The Karnataka High Court upheld it in 2025. [15]

Under §69A, the volume is no longer a trickle. Parliament was told in 2023 that MeitY averaged about 6,000 blocking orders a year and had blocked 36,838 URLs between January 2018 and October 2023. Senior ministry officials later told The Indian Express the tally rose to roughly 12,600 orders in 2024 and 24,300 in 2025 — with about 60% of recent orders aimed at X, and the emergency clause (interim block pending 48-hour committee ratification) “increasingly used.” [36]

Circumvention is in the crosshairs too. KeepItOn’s 2025 India section records that on 29 December 2025 authorities in Jammu & Kashmir imposed a roughly two-month ban on unauthorized VPN use, with reports of about 800 users penalized. [5]

Reporters Without Borders ranks India 151st of 180 in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index (2026 listing: 157th). [31] When the network and the platforms both go dark, independent reporting is what dies first.