Hyderabad, July 26 -- Late on July 23, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), an arm of the Union Home Ministry, sent GitHub an ultimatum: remove three repositories of the messaging app Bitchat within three hours or lose your legal protection and face criminal proceedings.

As someone who has followed technology for years, I have seen governments do foolish things online. But this takedown order deserves its own category of absurdity and its implications should worry every Indian.

What the Bitchat GitHub takedown order demands

Bitchat is a free, open-source messaging app backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. It lets phones talk to each other over Bluetooth, passing messages device to device - no internet, no servers, no phon...