Political insecurity is masquerading as national security

The Narendra Modi government is deploying Section 69A not against enemies of the state, but against its own citizens

As you read this, the Government of India is busy deploying Section 69A of the Information Technology Act not against terrorists, not against enemy agents, but against a satirical cartoon, a comedian's reel, and a retired wing commander who posted lyrics to a song. A retired officer of the Indian Air Force, someone who served this nation, received a takedown notice, not for espionage but for a song! That is not national security, it is political insecurity.

Consider a basic analogy. A CEO is hired by a company's shareholders. Instead of fixing falling revenues and broken supply chains, he spends every Monday morning firing anyone who gave him a two-star rating instead of five stars. In a democracy, the people are the shareholders. Parliament is the board. The government, however omnipotent it feels the morning after an election, is management, hired on a renewable five-year contract. A bad review is not a mutiny. It is feedback. It is the oxygen democratic governance requires to survive.

When citizens complain that LPG cylinders are unaffordable, that food adulteration goes unchecked, that new bridges are collapsing, that roads are full of potholes, that the Prime Minister's body language in front of foreign leaders invites ridicule, they are not being anti-national. They are being shareholders doing their job. The government's job is to fix the problem, not to shoot the messenger.

Since early this year, the Union government has issued a cascade of takedown orders targeting posts on X and Instagram by journalists, lawyers, political parties, and activists. These posts are geo-blocked inside India while remaining fully visible to the rest of the world. Citizens in France, the United States, and Pakistan can watch what Indians are legally barred from seeing about their own Prime Minister. If that is not a masterclass in catastrophic image mismanagement, history has yet to produce one.

The numbers are really damning. From January to June 2025, Meta removed three times as much content under Indian government orders compared to the same period in 2023. In the single week between March 11 and 19, at least 42 accounts were restricted. The Ministry of Electronics and IT, once a governance body, has quietly transformed itself into a 24/7 State censorship bureau. This is where India's administrative bandwidth is going: not to reform, not to delivery, but to digital suppression.

There is a near-poetic phenomenon in the physics of censorship. In 2003, Barbra Streisand tried to suppress aerial photographs of her Malibu home. A photograph viewed six times before the lawsuit was viewed 4,20,000 times within a month. The Internet named it the Streisand Effect: suppression guarantees amplification. India's government has discovered this law, apparently without reading it. A comedian's satirical reel mocking the Prime Minister's conduct with foreign dignitaries exploded in reach after the ban. A song titled ‘All Izz Hell’, a direct attack on the government, went viral after the tweet sharing it was blocked.

India is approaching two billion people. There are more smartphones in Indian hands than there are people in the US and the European Union combined. Every village has a content creator. Every autorickshaw runs on a data plan. How many posts will the government censor? How many accounts will it block before it runs out of servers or credibility? Shut one account today, and a hundred open tomorrow. Restrict a meme, and it becomes a movement. Arrest a comedian, and you manufacture a martyr who sells out arenas. The irony is that a government elected on the promise of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas has spent extraordinary political capital, administrative bandwidth, and legal firepower to silence a cartoonist, block a retired officer's tweet, and geo-restrict the very citizens who handed it power.

Criticism of the Prime Minister is not a security threat. It is a democratic reflex as natural and as necessary as breathing. When the PM underperforms on an international stage, people will notice it. When bridges fall, people will ask questions. When the economy pinches and gas cylinders become a luxury, people will speak out. This is not sedition. This is citizenship.

To the advisers whispering into powerful ears that faster takedowns and harsher IT rules will fix the government's image problem: you are wrong. You are making the government look weak, thin-skinned, and afraid of cartoons, of songs, and of comedians. The strongest governments were never those that silenced critics. Fix the roads. Deliver the gas, and let the Constitution breathe. Do that — and no satirist, no comedian, no meme page will find purchase.

The people of India did not elect a government to rule over them. They hired it to serve them. The contract is renewable. And between elections, criticism — sharp, funny, even unfair — is not the enemy of democracy. It is its heartbeat.

Sachi Satapathy is a development professional.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)