India Orders GitHub to Take Down Jack Dorsey's Bitchat as Protesters Go Offline

On July 23, India's Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an arm of the Ministry of Home Affairs, sent GitHub a takedown notice with an unusually short fuse: block public access to three repositories hosting Bitchat, the decentralized messaging app created by Jack Dorsey, within three hours. Dorsey published the notice on X the next day with a one-line reaction: "the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down."

What makes this order remarkable is not that India blocked an app — it does that routinely. It's that the government went after the source code itself, on the world's largest code-hosting platform, because of what the software is designed to do.

What Bitchat is, and why protesters reached for it

Bitchat is a peer-to-peer messaging app that needs no account, no phone number, and no server. Nearby phones link up over Bluetooth Low Energy into a mesh, passing encrypted messages device to device; when internet is available, it can also relay over the Nostr protocol. Messages can hop through phones that carry them physically — a store-and-forward design that keeps working when the internet doesn't. The app can even relay signed Bitcoin transactions across the mesh until one connected device broadcasts them, a detail CoinDesk highlighted in its coverage.

That architecture met its moment in Delhi. Since July 20, student-led protests over an alleged national exam paper leak — organized under the tongue-in-cheek "Cockroach Janta Party" banner — have drawn some of India's largest crowds in years, and authorities responded with repeated localized internet suspensions around protest sites. Cut off from WhatsApp and Instagram, demonstrators turned to mesh-networking apps like Bitchat and Briar that shrug off shutdowns.

The numbers tell the story. According to app-intelligence figures reported by TechCrunch, Bitchat was downloaded more than 91,000 times in India between July 17 and 23 — 85% of its global downloads that week, up from roughly 1% the month before — with a 32-fold single-day spike on July 19 and a record 330,000-plus daily active users in India by Thursday.

The legal order, and the debate around it

The notice invokes Section 79(3)(b) of India's IT Act along with the 2021 IT Rules, and reportedly also references the older Section 69A blocking framework. Its core argument: Bitchat's design "significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation by law enforcement agencies." In other words, the problem isn't a specific piece of illegal content — it's that the software can't be wiretapped.

That framing is precisely what has digital-rights lawyers alarmed. Legal experts told TechCrunch the order appears unprecedented in targeting an open-source project for its functionality rather than for hosting unlawful content — and questioned whether India's existing blocking powers authorize removing code at all. The Internet Freedom Foundation put the practical objection bluntly: "The order also fails on its own terms as deleting a repository does not delete the application from any phone that carries it, and the mesh keeps functioning without servers. What the takedown actually prevents is scrutiny of the underlying code."

GitHub, for its part, pointed to its standard process. "When we receive a complete government takedown request, we notify the affected account owners and give them an opportunity to appeal. We share every government takedown request we take action on publicly," said Rose Coogan, GitHub's principal online safety counsel. As of late last week, the repositories remained accessible from India, and the app was still live on both the App Store and Google Play.

Why code takedowns rarely stick

Even if GitHub complies, the practical effect is limited:

• Permissive licensing. Bitchat's code ships under permissive open-source terms, so anyone can legally mirror it on Codeberg, GitLab, or a self-hosted server — and mirrors tend to multiply after takedown attempts.
• Installed apps keep working. The mesh needs no server to switch off. Every phone that already has Bitchat remains a functioning node.
• Sideloading exists. On Android, an APK passed hand to hand — or over the mesh itself — bypasses app stores entirely.

There's also the publicity problem: the surest way to teach millions of people that offline mesh messaging exists is to try to ban it during a protest. The download spike preceded the takedown notice — it was driven by the shutdowns themselves.

The bigger picture

India has spent years building one of the world's most muscular internet-control regimes — the same IT Rules at issue here also underpin its AI-content labeling mandates, which we covered in our comparison of AI regulation in the EU, US, India, and China. The Bitchat order extends that logic from platforms to protocols: if a network can't be intercepted, its blueprint becomes the target.

Access Now's Namrata Maheshwari warned that blocking offline messaging during shutdowns risks turning a network restriction into a total communication blackout, with obvious fundamental-rights implications. Whether Indian courts see it that way may end up mattering far beyond one app — for encrypted messengers generally, a theme familiar from our guide to chat privacy: architectures that can't hand over data are increasingly treated as suspects themselves.

FAQ

Is Bitchat banned in India?

No. The order targets three GitHub repositories hosting Bitchat's source code, not the app itself. As of late last week the app remained available on the App Store and Google Play in India, and the repositories were still reachable.

Does removing code from GitHub disable the app?

No. Bitchat runs serverlessly over Bluetooth mesh, so installed copies keep working regardless of what happens to the repository. The code is also permissively licensed, meaning legal mirrors can appear on other platforms within minutes.

Why do protesters use mesh-networking apps?

Because they work without internet. During a government-imposed shutdown, apps like Bitchat and Briar relay encrypted messages phone-to-phone over Bluetooth, so a dense crowd effectively becomes its own network.

What law did India cite?

The notice invokes Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act and the 2021 IT Rules, reportedly alongside references to the Section 69A blocking framework. Legal experts dispute whether any of these provisions authorize the removal of open-source code based on its functionality rather than specific unlawful content.