India Is Embracing China’s Authoritarian Tactics for Digital Surveillance and Control
The country’s undemocratic turn is dangerous not only for its own citizens but also the world as other populist rulers emulate its methods
India is quietly building one of the world’s most sophisticated administrative architectures for controlling online speech. The clearest indication is the government’s recent attempt to mandate the pre-installation of the Sanchar Saathi app on new mobile devices—a move it later withdrew after pushback from the opposition, industry, and device manufacturers. But though defeated for now, this app, combined with Sahyog, a portal that the government has already launched under the guise of consumer protection, illuminates the frightening aspiration of the Modi government for digital surveillance and control.
Sahyog is a centralized content-takedown mechanism that allows various entities to flag objectionable material, which government agencies then use to demand platform removals outside normal legal channels. When deployed alongside Sanchar Saathi, authorities would have been able to identify and trace the people behind phone numbers and establish a smooth pipeline to identify authors and suppress their content—quickly, administratively, and with minimal judicial oversight.
What’s happening in India is worth understanding, because other governments are watching. As the world’s largest democracy and a massive digital market, India’s governance templates travel. Systems that combine rapid takedown authority with tools capable of tracing digital identities increasingly resemble the architecture of internet governance seen in more overtly authoritarian states like Russia and China. The framework taking shape in India offers an exportable blueprint for governments seeking to manage online dissent while maintaining the outward form of democratic institutions.
The New Modalities of Digital Regulation
For years, intermediary regulation in India rested on statutory tools like Section 69A of the Information Technology Act and the IT Rules, which—despite flaws—required written orders, prescribed grounds, and at least nominal judicial review. Over the past year, however, enforcement has shifted. Sahyog now operates as an administrative conduit through which multiple government agencies can send takedown demands directly to platforms, often bypassing Section 69A’s procedural scaffolding of reasoned orders, deliberative scrutiny, and a public record. The result is an ecosystem where executive directives move at network speed with minimal oversight.
This is a substantive shift. Procedural safeguards create friction, enable scrutiny, and offer redress—the basic architecture of democratic speech protection. When removal authority changes from a rule-bound, quasi-judicial process into an administrative pipeline, that beneficial friction is stripped away. Administrative systems prize efficiency and scale; when applied to speech, those imperatives can sideline constitutional commitments in favor of expedience.
When farmers protesting agricultural reforms find live-streams intermittently unavailable at crucial moments, or when posts are withheld “in the interest of public order” under broad legal authorities governing online content moderation, the practical effect is not abstract. It’s the silencing of voices precisely when visibility matters the most. Even short removals can blunt momentum, fragment solidarity, and dilute accountability. If you think technocracy is bad in liberal polities, wait till we get an illiberal technocracy unmoored from procedures and rules.
In India, during moments of unrest, journalists and activists have already seen their social media accounts temporarily blocked at the request of the government, only to be restored days later once the immediate controversy subsides. During the 2021 farmers’ protests, for example, Twitter briefly blocked the accounts of more than 100 activists, journalists, and publications at the request of India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT, then restored them. For a freelance journalist dependent on real-time reach, even a temporary disruption can mean lost income, credibility, and impact.
Data Insecurity
Other recent scandals also show what’s at stake. Consider Aadhaar, India’s universal biometric identifier system, initially created to streamline welfare delivery and facilitate access to banking and telecom services. Setting aside a 2018 revelation that access to Aadhaar records could be purchased through intermediaries for ₹500 (about 75 cents), there have been multiple instances when government portals have inadvertently exposed beneficiary data. But the system’s biggest danger is that it creates an infrastructure for state traceability.
This is not an idle worry in a country where the state has established control of the media, installing loyalists after ousting critics at major outlets. Individual journalists, opposition leaders, and activists also discovered that the government had used Pegasus, a highly sophisticated Israeli spy software, to hack their phones. An investigative reporter received threatening messages from unknown senders after participating in an online campaign critical of the government. It can’t be proved that the Indian state directly caused her exposure. Still, there is more than enough evidence to justify anxiety that data boundaries have become porous thanks to state penetration.
Court Patchwork
The constitutional consequences of this administrative turn are now playing out in state courts. Last September, the High Court in Karnataka, a southern Indian state, rejected X’s challenge to Sahyog, ruling that a foreign platform cannot fully claim Article 19 protections and arguing that the portal is a legitimate tool to curb “anarchic” online speech. The decision narrows the standing of global intermediaries and signals reduced judicial receptivity to arguments that administrative takedown pipelines amount to extra-statutory censorship. Although X has indicated it will appeal, the ruling already marks a doctrinal shift on legal standing and Article 19, as well as a strategic consolidation of the administrative model.
Yet judicial responses remain uneven: other benches have scrutinized comparable regimes and cautioned against unchecked delegation of takedown power to executive officers. This emerging patchwork underscores a larger institutional question—whether courts will reaffirm procedural discipline and reasoned orders or defer to executive claims that speed on national-security imperatives justify centralized control. The answer will determine whether India’s constitutional culture continues to sustain independent adjudication of executive incursions into the digital public sphere.
From Anti-Fraud Utility to an Identity-Mapping and Surveillance Engine
Sanchar Saathi was launched and advertised by the Indian government as “a citizen-facing initiative to report telecom fraud, verify IMEIs (a unique numeric identifier for mobile devices), and help consumers protect themselves from scams.” Official releases emphasize consumer protection metrics: millions of downloads, large numbers of recovered handsets, and substantial citizen engagement through complaint mechanisms. The platform’s dashboard aggregates suspicious user flags and offers features such as Chakshu and the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI) to detect and categorize phone numbers associated with fraud risk. Taken at face value, Sanchar Saathi is a serviceable consumer-protection tool that leverages telecom metadata for legitimate purposes.
For an elderly pensioner who may lose savings to a spoofed bank call or fraud, the promise of being able to report the number instantly and have it flagged as high-risk offers tangible reassurance. For naïve migrant workers frequently targeted by job-scam messages, a visible state-backed fraud filter can feel like overdue protection.
But functionality is never politically neutral. Since its release, the platform’s scope has gradually expanded in ways that change its privacy calculus, culminating in an order last November from the Department of Telecommunications directing smartphone manufacturers to pre-install the app on new devices. Even though the plan was aborted, it still indicates an intention to embed Sanchar Saathi into the telecommunications life-cycle of Indian citizens rather than confine it to discretionary use. Pre-installation mandates, when coupled with backend access to subscriber metadata and IMEI verification services, create a systemic potential for identity linkage: multiple SIMs or phone numbers can be mapped to a single person, and device identifiers themselves can serve as durable handles for tracing. What began as a fraud-fighting tool has become an infrastructure that can, intentionally or not, enable rapid identification and linkage between content and speaker.
Imagine a first-time smartphone user in a small town powering on a new device and finding a state-linked verification app already embedded in the setup process. The message conveyed is subtle but powerful: connectivity is conditional, traceable, and integrated with centralized oversight from the outset.
Mapping phone numbers to individuals is not always problematic. Law enforcement agencies routinely rely on such linkage for legitimate purposes: fraud prevention, criminal investigations, and national-security inquiries, when it occurs under clear statutory authority and meaningful judicial oversight. The concern arises when those safeguards erode, and identification capabilities are paired with mechanisms that allow the state to suppress online content quickly and administratively. Also, things may not simply stop at removal; once identified, the person may also become subject to criminal or civil follow-up.
A Pattern, Not a Glitch
Publicly documented takedown orders targeting journalists, opposition figures, and critical commentators show a clear pattern: removals cluster around political controversies and reporting that criticizes the government, rather than neutral categories of illegality—a trend flagged both in platform litigation and civil-society monitoring.
The apparatus works two ways: takedowns kill information quickly; metadata linkage makes anonymity increasingly untenable. Together, they produce not just deletion but the credible threat of what comes after—investigations, subpoenas, criminal charges. The rational response is silence, or speech so cautious it no longer matters.
Imagine a university student who runs an anonymous social media page critiquing campus administration and never receives a formal notice. But if they believe that device identifiers and SIM registrations can easily be cross-referenced should a takedown request ever be sent to the platform hosting the content, they may shut the page down themselves. The chilling effect precedes any prosecution.
Over time, this can produce a subtler transformation: fewer whistleblowers reaching out to reporters, bureaucrats willing to leak documents, and local activists willing to livestream confrontations with authorities. The public record becomes thinner not because events cease, but because documenting them feels riskier.
The Democratic Stakes of Digital Governance
India is not the first country to go down this road. China has required real-name verification for years, enabling identity-tied takedowns that have gutted online dissent. Turkey’s post-2020 social media laws mandate swift compliance and local removal capacity; monitors have documented waves of politically targeted takedowns. Russia’s SORM/Yarovaya framework forces platforms to retain communications data and give security services access to it—turning every past post into potential future evidence. In each case, the architecture came first, and the political use followed, often faster than anyone predicted.
The government’s retreat on Sanchar Saathi shows the system is not immovable. But we need to remain steadfast in our insistence on restoring meaningful limits and reasoned orders before content is suppressed; genuine judicial review; strict constraints on metadata retention and linking; and accountability for platforms that over-comply.
Policy choices don’t happen in a vacuum. Administrative tools take their character from the governments that build them, and one that prioritizes order and the suppression of dissent over pluralist contestation will design bureaucratic instruments accordingly, whatever language of “safety” or “fraud prevention” it wraps them in. The pattern is visible: shrinking civic space, an emboldened executive, selective deployment of state power against critics, and a steady narrowing of procedural accountability. Administrative censorship is becoming routine; identity-tracing is embedded in consumer devices; judicial redress is harder to access. This is authoritarian drift enacted through legal-administrative means rather than open constitutional rupture—and it is precisely the trajectory scholars of democratic erosion have long warned about.
Democracy rarely ends with a dramatic rupture in the new modes of authoritarianism ascendant in the world today. It ends with a series of quiet administrative decisions that, taken together, make dissent too costly to sustain. India is not there yet. But the architecture for getting there is being assembled, one portal at a time.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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