NEW DELHI: When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government cut mobile Internet services at the site of youth-led protests in New Delhi, students found new ways to stay in touch.
Thousands of young people have been protesting, some camping under tarpaulin in the capital, demanding changes to the education system after a series of irregularities in life-changing exams, including leaks of some papers.
India’s Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order suspending mobile Internet services for eight hours on July 23 within 1.5 kilometres (nearly one mile) of the protest site.
The action was needed “in the interest of public order and for preventing incitement to the commission of any offence”, said the document, published on the ministry’s website.
Some students simply switched to Bitchat – a peer-to-peer messaging system that relies on Bluetooth to link people who are nearby into an ad-hoc network without using the Internet.
“Many people are using Bitchat,” Kumar Shalabh, 21, said of the open-source app developed by American tech entrepreneur Jack Dorsey.
Shalabh is among the many protesters demanding change, and the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.
He used artificial intelligence (AI) services Claude and ChatGPT to seek out new ways to communicate.
“They think we are just part of the Internet. Yeah, we know the Internet – we also know how to communicate without the Internet,” he said.
“They think we are dumb, we are foolish, but actually we are quite smart.”
Bitchat founder
The demonstrations led by the social media-driven Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) have become one of the biggest challenges to Hindu-nationalist Modi’s administration since his 2024 re-election for a third term.
The protest has evolved to include concerns over unemployment, opportunities for young people and what critics have called Modi’s increasingly authoritarian style of governance.
As tensions escalated, notably when police fired tear gas and used batons against tens of thousands of demonstrators on July 20, protesters said their mobile Internet communications slowed or stopped.
Some of the students, most of them Gen Z, said they were ready.
Khushi, who only gave her first name, said she and her friends decided where to meet before leaving home because they anticipated network interruptions at the protest site.
“Then there is Bitchat, where you can message using Bluetooth,” the 19-year-old told AFP.
On July 24, Bitchat founder Dorsey shared another government document in a post to X and said: “The government of India does not like technologies like Bitchat and wants it taken down.”
Digital rights advocates have demanded the newest order be revoked.
“We stand with the developers and the young protesters whose speech this order seeks to silence,” the Internet Freedom Foundation said.
‘Reaching people’
Internet shutdowns in India, the world’s largest democracy, are frequent.
According to international non-profit Access Now, India ranked second globally in 2025 in Internet shutdowns, imposing 65 “during protests, conflict, communal violence, and religious holidays”.
Digital rights activist Nikhil Pahwa said he was not surprised when mobile Internet services were suspended.
“That’s how the state responds, because it doesn’t have the ability or the capacity or the sense of how to deal with protests or with issues,” he told AFP.
“And its first port of call is to block access to the Internet to prevent information from spreading.”
Many people in India relied on Internet connections to make digital payments, he said.
Despite finding alternatives to mobile Internet services, many protesters struggled to communicate with each other and worried family members back home.
“Basically calls are coming but they are not able to hear us,” said 19-year-old Gunveer Singh.
“Internet works or not, the message is reaching people, and that will keep happening,” he added. – AFP
