A decade-long trend in digital governance in India crescendoed last week when a slew of social media accounts operated by independent activists and journalists were blocked apparently for criticising the Union government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his government’s West Asia policies and the LPG crisis.

In seven years, from 2014 to 2021, the number of URLs, posts, and accounts blocked ballooned from 470 to 9,800; since then, there is evidence that entire accounts, especially if they were publishing politically unfavourable comments, were being blocked.

There was a wave of censorship during the farmers’ protest in late 2020 and early 2021, and then during the second wave of the pandemic when the Union government was apparently more concerned with its image than with helping citizens with oxygen and hospital beds.

The Karnataka High Court recently noted that Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, under which content may be blocked for a threat to public order, was upheld by the Supreme Court of India in the Shreya Singhal (2015) case because of its procedural safeguards, including the right of the affected party to be heard and the requirement of a reasoned order and judicial review.

These safeguards are being eroded as the state uses Rule 16 of the 2009 Blocking Rules to withhold blocking orders from the affected person, essentially making a system where only the executive knows why it is censoring certain content.

The confidentiality of blocking orders is being invoked to prevent users from approaching a court for a remedy, which essentially erodes the only safeguard against arbitrary digital exile.

In the X Corp v. Union of India case (2023), the Karnataka High Court had actually said that even though Section 69A did not require it, the state should give notice to a user if it is blocking an entire account, because this takes away the user’s right to be heard.

Instead of following this, the government has used Section 69A and the 2009 Rules to keep its blocking orders secret, as it did last week.

In many instances, the affected users had no idea that their accounts were going to be blocked until after it actually happened.

In the name of confidentiality, the Centre refuses to share the results of its review committee, an entirely executive body that has never once cancelled a blocking order since 2009.

By decentralising the power to block links to various ministries, the government is building a regime of arbitrary censorship where any department could silence its critics without the specialised oversight of the IT Ministry.

To check this, all social media blocks must be accompanied by a reasoned order that is shared with the affected user, as mandated in the Shreya Singhal case.

Until this is done, digital governance in India will continue to result in digital exile for its citizens.