First he tried messaging friends, but WhatsApp was down. Then, the credit card readers at his clothing store were not working. Ride-sharing apps were offline too.
Harsh Madhok, who runs a clothing business in Jaipur, a city of 3 million people, had read about Internet shutdowns elsewhere in India. Now he was in the middle of one in his city in central India, as authorities tried to damp down unrest following a traffic incident that led to clashes between police and locals.
“It’s very frustrating,” Madhok, 45, said of the Sept. 9 shutdown. “These things leave you feeling like you don’t know what’s going on.”
Under the rule of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Internet shutdowns have escalated sharply in the world’s largest democracy.
According to a database maintained by the Software Freedom Law Centre, an online advocacy group in New Delhi, officials ordered shutdowns 42 times between January and August. That compares with six times in all of 2014, when Modi first came to power.
This year the shutdowns were spread over 11 states, compared with just one in 2012.
The disconnections, which state governments have said are necessary for maintaining public order, typically happen without official explanation.
They have followed farmer agitations, protests by a minority community calling for government jobs, and public violence sparked by a Facebook post.
The frequency of the shutdowns has raised concerns that internal security is being used as a justification to clamp down on freedom of expression. That refrain has been heard more frequently since Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won elections in 2014 with an emphasis on security.
“If citizens are using the Internet to mobilize themselves, then how is shutting down the Internet any different from suppressing dissent?” an editorial in Mint said in July.
Until this year, shutdowns were implemented under colonial-era curfew laws that were used as the basis for rules requiring Internet service providers to shut off connections at the request of any government agency.
Early last month, the Indian Ministry of Communications issued new explicit rules that formalized the power of states and the central government to block the Internet.
“These rules are among the first of their kind in a democracy,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, policy director of Access Now, a US-based group that works on technology policy and digital rights worldwide.
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