Gen Z rewrote the rules of political campaigning, says IFF's Apar Gupta

Apar Gupta, lawyer and founder-director of digital rights advocacy platform Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), is a forceful critic of arbitrary surveillance and opaque censorship. An alumnus of the Columbia University School of Law, he was also at the forefront of net neutrality campaigns and online privacy protection in India. As someone who has dealt with landmark cases on digital liberties, privacy and online speech, he was vocal during the recent Jantar Mantar protests. He speaks to Open on a range of topics, including criticism against him, IT Rules, disruption of Internet services, recent public spat with Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami and the Gen Z protests in India. Gupta also refuted being "confronted" or "interrogated" by Arnab Goswami, stating the call was from "Niranjan from Republic TV". Edited excerpts:

What are your thoughts in general about the use of IT Rules to rein in dissent and the dissemination of “inconvenient” information in India?

The system is working as it has been built to work, which I have described in my work as digital censorship infrastructure. Our censorship framework rests on Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Blocking Rules of 2009. Rule 16 of those Rules makes every blocking order confidential. The person whose post or account disappears is rarely heard before the order, and the public almost never sees it. What we can count comes from parliamentary responses, which reveal that data on blocking directions grew from 471 URLs in 2014 to 6,775 in 2022. In July 2025, X disclosed that it had been directed to block 2,355 accounts in India, including that of Reuters. The direction was partly reversed only after public embarrassment. The newer development is a parallel, faster channel. Takedown notices are now routed in bulk through the Sahyog Portal, operated by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre under the Ministry of Home Affairs. These notices invoke Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021, which permits authorised officers, usually police officers from different states and Union Territories. This inverts Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) 5 SCC 1, where the Supreme Court held that intermediaries can be made to remove content only on a court order or a government notification conforming to Article 19(2), precisely so that Section 79 would not become a censorship power. This year we have seen the escalation from URLs to entire platforms, with Telegram blocked across the country until the NEET re-examination on 22 June, and the new Synthetically Generated Information amendments, in force since 20 February 2026, imposing three-hour removal deadlines.

Any response on the attack against you by the likes of Arnab Goswami over the guidance you issued to the Jantar Mantar protesters on how to sidestep Internet shutdowns? What were your objectives for that guidance?

Let me first state what happened, because facts matter. On July 24, 2026, I got a call from +91 828797**** (last four digits omitted) at 5:34 PM that lasted for over 4 minutes on my mobile. I was told it was a person named Karamvir from Republic TV. I responded that I would not give more than two minutes, to which he responded by saying his editor, Niranjan, was talking to me. Then the entire conversation lasted about three and a half minutes out of the total four minutes. Niranjan, whom I addressed by name multiple times, was asking leading and long-winded questions. He constantly interrupted me about a carousel posted by IFF that detailed safety practices for participating in protests, calling it a "dossier". I told him to read it carefully, but he selectively excerpted parts and kept emphasising it was a dossier. I tried to tell him there were extensive references to the Constitution and how people can go with friends, carry water and supplies. I also told him it has digital safety guidelines, given the large amount of surveillance and internet shutdowns, and asked him why he wasn't doing a show on it.

No such conversation ever took place. I welcome criticism of my work, and there is plenty of it. Fabricating my participation in a confrontation that never occurred is something else entirely, and it is a waste of my time to even take the bait of going to their show, as Niranjan asked me to do when I ended this unpleasant call. Using rhetorical language such as "dossier," "toolkit," or "conspiracy" to pepper the broadcast is independent of the facts and statements contained in the safety guide for protesters posted by IFF. This is why I have dispatched a pocket copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to their offices. Perhaps I should also send a copy of the Constitution of India next month.

You advised the protesters to use BitChat during the shutdown, and we later learnt from Jack Dorsey that the I4C ordered GitHub to remove it. What does this incident reveal?

One correction to the framing first. I did not counsel anyone to defeat the law. The danger was created by the state, through successive mobile internet suspension orders around Jantar Mantar since mid-July, at least five by the count we have maintained, issued under Section 20(2)(b) of the Telecommunications Act, 2023, alongside reports of signal jammers at the site. When the network is dead, a Bluetooth mesh application lets a student locate a friend separated in a lathi charge, or reach a lawyer or an ambulance. These are safety practices. Now consider the order itself. Notice No. 11072601011432 was issued by the I4C at 11:16 pm on 23 July 2026 under Section 79(3)(b) read with Rule 3(1)(d), giving GitHub three hours to remove three BitChat code repositories on pain of losing safe harbour. Public authorities never published or publicly disclosed the order, and we learnt of it because Jack Dorsey posted it. Furthermore, the notice displays rank ignorance regarding how GitHub repositories can be easily replicated and forked. It has caused much consternation among Indian developers and open-source communities. The incident tells us three things. First, secrecy is the default. Second, the order is unlawful. After the Shreya Singhal judgment, Section 79(3)(b) confers no blocking power, which is confined to Section 69A with its safeguards, and the I4C is an administrative body with no statutory authority to direct censorship at all. Third, censorship has moved upstream, from speech to the tools and platforms of speech. Deleting a repository is seizing the printing press rather than an individual, and it also prevents security researchers from auditing the code. It is, finally, futile.

They say the Instagram generation excelled the WhatsApp generation. As a technologist and a lawyer, how do you assess the victory of the Gen Z protests?

I would resist scoring it as anyone's victory, partly because IFF is non-partisan and partly because the contest for accountability is a process. But the observation is sound. The BJP IT cell model was engineered for the WhatsApp of the last decade through an organised hierarchy of groups fed with scripted forwards. All of these have been upended in the tidal crush of Instagram Reels and video shorts. It rewards discovery, authenticity and personal narrative, making it harder to fake. It is a video-native platform with massive reach, and the algorithm promotes content shared for virality. Younger creators, fluent in this, set the terms of debate before official handles responded. It showed how the Prime Minister himself posted a close-up video short which seemed inauthentic, even though it deliberately lacked polish. The lawyer in me adds a caution. When persuasion fails, the response has been infrastructural: Access Now recorded 65 internet shutdowns in India in 2025, the most in any democracy, and 920 of the 2,102 documented worldwide since 2016. This month, the capital has seen suspensions, jammers and code takedowns. Even so, I take the long view. When a generation that treats the Internet as its civic square, and defends it with wit, Article 19 of the Constitution is working as intended.