By Mercedes Hutton

Internet shutdowns have become increasingly common in South Asian countries, with governments using digital blackouts as a tool to control information flow and suppress dissent. These shutdowns not only violate citizens’ fundamental rights to access information and freedom of expression but also cause substantial economic losses, disrupting businesses, educational institutions, and essential communication networks.

During protests, internet shutdowns severely limited the ability of activists to organize, document human rights violations, and communicate rapidly. Journalists and writers faced significant challenges in publishing their stories. In this panel, contributors of Global Voices in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, will share firsthand accounts of how they and their acquaintances navigated these digital blackouts.

Rezwan, Global Voices’ Regional Editor for South Asia, began the session with a brief overview of internet shutdowns, explaining how governments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have used total and partial internet shutdowns to control the flow of information. He explained how devastating the shutdowns can be for citizens who rely on digital systems not only to communicate and access information but in practically every aspect of their daily lives and asked the panel members to share their lived experiences of shutdowns.

Global Voices contributor Kanav Sahgal, a New Delhi-based researcher specialising in queer rights and the rule of law, began by saying: “India is said to be the world leader of internet shutdowns.”

One such shutdown occurred during wide-scale protests against changes to India’s Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019. Kanav spoke of the confusion that resulted as social media sites went down, leaving protesters cut off from one another and unsure of protest sites and where police had been deployed. “We had to rely on very creative means… we had to find a creative way to reach the protest site,” Kanav said.

He added that internet shutdowns were often accompanied by the application of colonial-era laws to further control the population, including Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which prohibits gatherings of five or more people.

“Almost every part of India has experienced some type of shutdown,” he said. In Jammu and Kashmir, a shutdown imposed after Prime Minister Narendra Modi removed the region’s autonomous status lasted for longer than a year. Most recently, the state of Manipur has experienced a shutdown following violence between the Meitei and Kuti ethnic groups.

Kanav said he spent “a lot of time looking at what the law says about this.” While access to the internet is a fundamental right enshrined in India’s constitution, “proportionality” allows the government to act to restrict it if it considers it to be appropriate.

As activists, as journalists are trying to report on this, it becomes very difficult to do so because there’s not just internet shutdowns but there’s also police deployment, concerns about our security.

Pantha Rahman Reza, an author and translator for Global Voices, discussed an internet shutdown imposed by Bangladesh’s government after student-led protests in July, during which hundreds were killed. The demonstrations, which were sparked by the implementation of quotas for government jobs, escalated into violent clashes that ultimately brought down then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Pantha spoke about how disorienting it was to experience the internet outage and also how its impacts were felt by citizens and businesses across the country. After a protest at Dhaka University on July 15 ended with an attack on the students participating, the internet was shut down on July 18. Pantha, who said he watched the news online, went out on July 19 to see if he could find out what was going on. He said he visited a newsstand, but there were no newspapers.

Information was not the only thing Bangladeshi citizens were deprived of during the shutdown. Pantha explained how many of the country’s systems had been digitised, including gas and electricity, which many people paid for through applications. Without connectivity, they were unable to access basic utilities. Additionally, Pantha said women who made a living selling items online, often on Facebook marketplace, lost their source of income, and freelancers lost contracts.

The shutdown also introduced a sense of fear among the population, Pantha said, describing how after it had ended, people did not want to make social media posts public for journalists to use.

We have long been repressed by the Digital Security Act in our country. Previous governments sought to digitise everything, but then began brokering surveillance tools and monitoring social media and people’s trust was broken, and that went on until the government was overthrown and the prime minister fled in August.

With an interim government currently in place, people hoped that the act might be redrawn. However, lawsuits over years-old anti-government posts were still ongoing, placing a huge financial burden on those involved and generating fear.

Rezwan also shared his experience of the internet shutdown in Bangladesh, saying it came in while he was on a Global Voices call. He described a sense of frustration, and, like Pantha, he highlighted how the impact of these outages was felt at every level of society, including in the economy. He mentioned an online tool that calculates the cost of shutdowns.

“It does immense damage to everyone, it does immense psychological damage,” Rezwan said. “I know many diaspora people who tried to reach their families… many of the diaspora didn’t have the news.”

Annie Zaman, the co-founder of Exile Hub, which supports human rights defenders and journalists in distress, spoke about the recent implementation of a China-style firewall in Pakistan.

Annie, who is from Pakistan and is based in Chiang Mai, said that the situation with shutdowns in Pakistan was “very depressing.” The firewall, which uses Chinese technology to monitor online traffic and regulate popular applications, has been blamed for poor connectivity across the country. Already, authorities had suspended mobile networks and blocked a number of VPNs.

“Twitter was blocked, people went to Bluesky, now Bluesky is blocked,” Annie said.

Pakistan has 128 million internet users and is the main source of information for the country's youth — the majority of the country.

“Internet shutdowns are used as a form of internet battleground; information is seen as a form of evil,” Annie said, adding, “It is really disheartening that authoritarian governments still use internet shutdowns.”

Control of the internet in Pakistan also allows for the spread of government-originated disinformation and propaganda, Annie said. “What we see through our algorithms is government deepfake images.”

Speaking about India’s use of the law to justify its internet shutdowns, Kanav said: “Even though we have a law that talks about internet access as a universal right, there are also colonial-era laws.”

He explained that for every shutdown, a review committee was supposed to be formed. “But we don’t know who they are,” Kanav said, adding that it raised questions of procedural fairness. “When there are lapses in procedure, where do you seek redress?” he asked.

“You’re infringing on people’s right to express themselves… the question is where is that line being drawn,” Kanav said. “Internet shutdowns are hurdles to journalists’ ability to work and their safety,” he added.

Internet shutdowns serve governments to prevent images such as those of Abu Sayed, the Bangladeshi student activist shot dead by police on July 16, from being shared.  “These are powerful images that spark the revolution or the resistance,” Annie said, “these are the powerful images the governments don’t want us to see.”

In Pakistan, brutal incidents have squeezed civil society and resistance almost out of existence. Annie recounted how the mutilated bodies of missing Baloch people were thrown from helicopters to warn others against resisting the regime. “The military has so much control that people fear dissent, particularly after the May 9 incident last year,” she said, referring to the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan. “Now there is no space for any kind of dissent or to speak up, if you ask any Pakistani to speak up… they won’t.”

Annie said there was a joke among Pakistanis that everyone was reinstalling their landlines. “We’re going back to the dark ages,” she said.