India's order to GitHub was aimed at Bitchat's code, but the real problem for New Delhi is simpler: protesters had found a way to talk after the internet was cut.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, housed inside the Ministry of Home Affairs, sent GitHub a notice late on July 23 asking it to remove three Bitchat pages within three hours. ThePrint reported that the order cited Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act and Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021. The notice said the Bluetooth mesh app could help users evade lawful surveillance and be misused by anti-national elements and organised criminal groups.
The timing did the talking. Students were still camped around Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation over the NEET paper leak controversy. Northeast Herald reported that mobile internet was suspended within a 1.5-km radius of the protest site on July 23 as the agitation entered its 34th day. Protesters turned to Bitchat because it doesn't need mobile data, Wi-Fi, a phone number or an account. Phones relay messages to nearby phones over Bluetooth Low Energy. That's the whole trick.
The actual threat was not mysterious. It was coordination.
Dorsey posted the order on X on July 24, writing that the Indian government doesn't like technologies like Bitchat and wants it taken down. ThePrint said it could not independently verify the authenticity of the order, and that it had contacted I4C chief executive Rajesh Kumar for comment. Keep that caveat in the story. It matters, because we shouldn't pretend to have reporting we don't have.
The Internet Freedom Foundation then called the order unconstitutional and authoritarian, according to Maktoob Media and CoinGape. IFF argued that Section 79 is not a general blocking power, that the government had not identified specific unlawful content in the repositories, and that removing code from GitHub would not disable apps already installed on phones. That's not a technical quibble. It's the centre of the fight.
The code is not the network
Here's the problem with the India order. Removing an app from a distribution platform doesn't kill the protocol. Bitchat has no central server to seize, no user database to demand, and no corporate messaging backend that a regulator can call into compliance. Its own whitepaper describes a peer-to-peer messaging system built for ad-hoc networks, with Bluetooth Low Energy as the transport layer and encrypted sessions between peers.
GitHub is important because developers use it to publish and inspect the code. But it is still a repository, not the network itself. If the code has already been cloned, forked or downloaded, a takedown notice arrives late. The software can still run on devices that already have it. Android users can still sideload files if they find them elsewhere. Developers can still rebuild from public documentation. You can slow distribution. You can't pretend deletion from one platform deletes the idea.
That is why this order reads less like a confident enforcement action than an admission that the internet shutdown did not fully work. The whole point of cutting mobile data around Jantar Mantar was to make coordination harder. Bitchat routed around that pressure in a narrow but visible way. Then the government went after GitHub.
India is not alone. Apple removed Bitchat from China's App Store after a request from the Cyberspace Administration of China, a move Dorsey disclosed on X on April 5. 9to5Mac reported that the Chinese regulator cited rules for services with public opinion or social mobilization capabilities. Gigazine, citing Apple's notice, said the removal also affected TestFlight access in China and referred to a February 28 communication from Apple.
China's move tells you why this app now has political weight far beyond its feature set. The app was reported by Cointelegraph and 9to5Mac to have drawn users during internet restrictions and protests in Uganda, Iran, Nepal, Madagascar and Indonesia. That doesn't mean every download is political. Most technology never maps that neatly. But when a tool keeps working after mobile networks go dark, governments notice.
The crackdown is also marketing
For Dorsey, this fits a long pattern. TechCrunch reported in July 2025 that he had opened Bitchat to beta testers through Apple's TestFlight and published a whitepaper on GitHub. Forbes later described the project as a weekend effort by open-source collaborators, with Dorsey developing the iOS version and the pseudonymous developer Calle building the Android version. The newer whitepaper on GitExtract describes Bitchat as using Bluetooth nearby and Nostr relay mailboxes when an internet connection exists.
Frankly, governments could not have written a cleaner product brief for it. India says the app is dangerous because it can keep people communicating during network restrictions. China says it falls under rules for tools capable of public opinion or social mobilization. If you're a developer building censorship-resistant communications, that is not proof of failure. It's proof that the right people understood what you built.
None of this makes Bitchat magic. Bluetooth range is limited. Mesh networks need enough nearby users to be useful. The security of any app depends on implementation, updates and user behaviour, not just architecture. But the basic lesson is plain enough: once communication moves away from central servers and into open code running on personal devices, the old enforcement tools get weaker.
That is what India exposed. The notice may pressure GitHub, and it may make installation harder for people arriving late. It won't erase the phones already passing messages around Jantar Mantar, and it won't make developers forget how Bluetooth mesh works.
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