India’s MHA Orders GitHub to Pull Jack Dorsey’s BitChat Repos — IFF Calls It ‘Unconstitutional and Authoritarian’

India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, moving through its Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), has ordered GitHub to pull the code repositories of BitChat — a Bluetooth mesh messaging app built by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey — and the Internet Freedom Foundation isn’t staying quiet about it, calling the order “unconstitutional and authoritarian” and demanding it be withdrawn immediately.

The IFF dropped its formal statement on July 24, 2026. The government overstepped its legal authority, the group argues, and misused the relevant section of India’s IT law to justify the takedown notice. The digital rights group is seeking a full withdrawal of the MHA order, according to Maktoob Media. The foundation’s core argument runs broader than a statutory dispute: the government has no legal basis to compel a foreign-hosted platform to remove open-source code without a lawful, judicially reviewable process.

BitChat is decentralized. It runs on Bluetooth, no internet connection required, relaying messages peer-to-peer through a mesh network — which makes it significantly harder for authorities to monitor or block through conventional network-level interventions like IP blacklisting or DNS filtering. That architecture is precisely what drew official attention. Authorities justified the takedown by claiming the app could be misused by terrorists, according to Financial Express reporting. The order landed amid a wave of student protests sweeping across India, per CoinGape — a context digital rights advocates say reveals the order’s real motive: suppressing coordination tools, not addressing any specific, demonstrable security threat.

Jack Dorsey publicly reacted to the block order, according to Mashable India. He did not detail next steps. Dorsey has clashed with Indian authorities before — over content takedown demands during his tenure as Twitter CEO — and the Mashable report raised the question of whether he might pursue legal action in Indian courts, though no filing has been confirmed.

He’s not alone in pushing back. Multiple digital rights groups and legal experts have joined IFF in criticizing the GitHub order, per Financial Express. Critics are calling this category creep — the I4C was built to fight online fraud and financial crime, and here it’s being turned against open-source software development instead. The concern runs well beyond BitChat itself; if a government agency can compel GitHub to remove code repositories without judicial oversight, that precedent reaches any developer, any project, any platform hosting code accessible to Indian users.

The jurisdictional problem is unavoidable. GitHub is a U.S.-based platform owned by Microsoft. The MHA order came from a foreign government with no direct enforcement mechanism on American soil. The live question is whether GitHub complies voluntarily — as platforms routinely do when faced with foreign government demands — or pushes back, as it has in some past cases involving national security letters and surveillance requests. The company has not publicly stated its position.

India’s track record here is long and well-documented. The country consistently ranks among the world’s leaders for network shutdowns; the government has increasingly leaned on Section 69A of the IT Act alongside emergency powers under the IT Rules, 2021, to block apps, websites, and social media accounts, often without transparent process or judicial review. BitChat fits a pattern that IFF and others argue normalises preemptive censorship dressed up as national security.

What makes this case distinct is the target. Previous takedown orders hit apps with massive user bases — TikTok, PUBG, dozens of Chinese apps banned in 2020. BitChat is a developer project. The repositories are source code. Not a consumer product. Removing them does not disable the app for existing users; it stops developers from studying, auditing, forking, and building on the code — a distinction that matters enormously, because it shifts the government’s action from regulating communications to restricting the circulation of knowledge itself.

The IFF’s argument rests on a direct proposition: code is speech, and yanking repositories from a developer platform is a prior restraint on expression that demands constitutional scrutiny. Whether Indian courts will agree is entirely unresolved, and the answer could define the limits of executive authority over digital infrastructure for years to come. The story broke across Indian and international tech and crypto media within hours of the July 24 IFF statement. GitHub’s response — and Dorsey’s — will determine whether this becomes a full legal confrontation or quietly joins the growing archive of Indian takedown orders that were never challenged in court.