The Indian Parliament in this week has passed an amendment related to citizenship that has been met with controversy. The bill is called the Citizenship Amendment Bill and this bill excludes the Muslims from getting fast-tracked citizenship for the immigrants. As a result of this bill there were violent protests which took place in a few states in Northeast India like Tripura, Meghalaya, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and a story which has been familiar in the recent past came into effect. The mounting of the unrest led to the government taking an authoritarian step and shut the internet services of the said states down. The move was undertaken for just few hours and then took it for days.
It is not going to be a surprise if more states go into this digital lockdown over the next few days as the protests go on and spread to the other parts of the country.
As per the tracker that keeps a track of the shutdown in Internet, India has the most number of disruptions that have been ordered by any country as there are 91 reported disruption incidents just in this year. This number had been 134 in the year 2018.This does not include the number of incidents which may not have been reported. Going by this recent trend, India is the internet shutdown leader of the world and the country which is known as the largest democracy in the world leads in terms of the digital authoritarianism by a huge distance too.
The reason which has been seen worldwide is the intention of the government to silence the voices of dissent. Most of this imposition has been to contain the violence or spread of the violence if it had broken out.