India's Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an arm of the Ministry of Home Affairs, ordered GitHub to remove three code repositories of Bitchat, the Bluetooth mesh messaging app backed by Block CEO Jack Dorsey, giving the Microsoft-owned platform three hours to comply.
Dorsey published the notice on X on July 24. "the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down," he wrote. The post had drawn 2.3 million views by press time.
A Three-Hour Deadline
The order was issued on July 23 under Section 79(3)(b) of India's Information Technology Act, 2000, according to a statement from the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based digital rights group. It directs GitHub to disable access to three repositories under the permissionlesstech account — the main Bitchat project, its Android build, and the Android release files — and threatens the platform with loss of safe-harbor protection and criminal prosecution.
The notice cites no specific unlawful content. Per IFF's reading, the government objects to what the app is: software that enables communication "even during network restrictions" and can "circumvent lawful restrictions" during "internet shutdowns."
Bitchat routes messages phone-to-phone over Bluetooth mesh, relaying through up to seven hops with Noise protocol encryption and falling back to the Nostr protocol when internet is available. The app requires no account, phone number, or server, and its code is released into the public domain.
Protests and Blackouts
The order comes amid a youth-led protest movement over exam-paper leaks. Thousands of students have camped at Delhi's Jantar Mantar since June, and the Ministry of Home Affairs has suspended mobile internet around the site about five times since July 17 — most recently across a 1.5-kilometer radius from 4 pm until midnight on July 23, per IFF. With networks down, demonstrators have turned to offline tools such as Bitchat.
IFF called the takedown "unconstitutional and authoritarian," arguing that Section 79(3)(b) grants no blocking power under the Supreme Court's Shreya Singhal ruling, that anticipated misuse of a communications tool is no lawful basis to ban it, and that a three-hour deadline issued near midnight forecloses legal recourse. The group demanded the government withdraw the notice and publish all takedown directions issued under the provision.
"Governments that fear people talking without permission will always go after the tools that make it possible," the Bitchat Community account posted.
The repositories remained accessible on GitHub as of press time, and neither GitHub nor Microsoft has commented publicly. The takedown may accomplish little in any case: the repository counts more than 3,000 public forks, and deleting it removes nothing from phones already running the app. India joins China in moving against Bitchat — Beijing ordered Apple to pull the app from its local App Store in April.