If the Centre had a good reason to block BitChat, it should say so in public

Some time in early October, BitChat disappeared from Indian app stores. Apple told users it was acting on a demand from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under Section 69A of the IT Act, because the app “includes content that is illegal in India”. It did not say what content, and the government has not said either. The order itself has never been published.

That is a strange claim to make about BitChat. The app, built by the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, hosts nothing. It lets phones pass encrypted messages to one another over Bluetooth, so it keeps working when mobile data is cut. Its following in India grew during the Delhi internet shutdowns around the Jantar Mantar protests. An earlier order in July, from the Home Ministry’s cybercrime centre, was more candid: it objected that the app allowed anonymous messaging and could let people communicate during shutdowns.

Last week the Kerala High Court gave three Union ministries, Apple and Google four weeks to explain the block. It is the first time anyone in government will have to put the reasons on record before a judge. They should not have needed a court to ask.

The bargain of 2015

When the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A in Shreya Singhal in 2015, it let Section 69A stand. The reason was its safeguards. A blocking order must give reasons in writing, a committee must review it, and the 2009 Blocking Rules provide for the person behind the content to be heard. Those protections are why the power was held to be narrow enough to survive.

In practice the rules have drifted the other way. Rule 9 allows emergency blocking with no prior notice. Rule 16 imposes strict confidentiality on everything done under the rules, and the government has relied on it to refuse requests under the Right to Information Act. The Karnataka High Court has held that notifying a platform is enough, with no duty to tell the users whose speech is blocked. The Delhi High Court, in the Tanul Thakur case, at least ordered the government to hand a blocked website its order and hear it afterwards. A challenge to Rules 9 and 16 has been pending before the Supreme Court since March 2025.

The result is a power that is checked on paper and secret in use. People cannot challenge what they cannot see.

The government’s case, fairly put

There are real reasons to act quickly against some content: a call to violence, a threat to national security, an operation meant to inflame a riot. Publishing every detail at once could help those behind it. Encrypted apps can be misused, and the state has a duty to keep order.

None of that requires permanent secrecy, and none of it fits a general-purpose messaging tool. An app that lets citizens talk when the network is down is not illegal content. Blocking it because it might be used by protesters, as SFLC.in has argued, is not a ground the law recognises. If the government believes otherwise, it should make that argument openly.

What should change

First, the BitChat order, its grounds and the review committee’s record should be placed before the Kerala High Court in full and, unless a specific part is genuinely sensitive, made public.

Second, every blocking order should be published by default in a searchable register, with the ministry, the legal ground and the date. Where secrecy is needed, it should be for a fixed period and for stated reasons.

Third, developers and users whose content is blocked should get a copy of the order and a hearing, as the 2009 rules already contemplate.

Fourth, the Supreme Court should hear the pending challenge to Rule 16 without further delay. More than a decade after Shreya Singhal, the safeguards it relied on deserve to be tested against how the power is actually used.

A government confident in its reasons has nothing to lose by stating them.