Digital Sovereignty

Indian law is evolvingto address the challenges. The Information Technology Rules, 2021, require platforms to remove unlawful content swiftly and to trace the first originator' of such content. Telegram recently agreed to provide user data (IP addresses) in response to legal requests. However, WhatsApp is challenging in the Delhi High Court the 'traceability' mandate

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Hearing a petition seeking restoration of a doctor's blocked WhatsApp Messenger account, a Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta recently advised her, "There's this indigenous app called Arattai ... use that. Make In India!" These judicial remarks, seemingly casual, reflect a deeper concern about India's digital sovereignty. "Arattai," Tamil for "conversation," is a Made-in-India messaging app hosted on Indian servers. It gained popularity following endorsements from senior Cabinet Ministers and has now crossed one crore downloads.

For over a decade since the era of chargeable Short Message Service (SMS), global platforms have monopolised our private conversations, expanding from text to multimedia messages and even video calls, all for free; Some say there is no free lunch.

Foreign-hosted apps pose a critical legal issue for Indian users, public servants in particular. When they communicate through these servers, they may risk violating the Public Records Act, 1993. Section 4 explicitly prohibits "taking out of India any public records of the Government," including digital records. Section 9 even prescribes imprisonment of up to five years for such violations. Few have been charged, and the practice remains widespread. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) launched Sandes as an indigenous alternative, but it has not gained much traction among the general public.

At the heart of modern messaging is End-to-End Encryption (E2EE), which ensures a message is encrypted on the sender's device and decrypted only by the recipient, protecting data both in transit and at rest. WhatsApp (about 3 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs)), Apple's iMessage (1 billion MAUs) and Signal (70 million MAUs) apply E2EE by default.