When internet shutdowns become a regular newspaper headlines, you know it’s about time to start the movement of interpreting a right to internet into Part III of the Constitution.

My personal interest piqued on an edited interview of Farooq Khan, Advisor to the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir in the Economic Times, where he blithely stated that internet was just a facility. It’s not as if one doesn’t know that internet shutdowns do happen in the country, and the reasons can even be genuine, but the inkling that those in power are starting to cross a line starts when despite looking at the newspaper headlines casually, one yet finds an alarming rise on the topic.

Now the inkling in my head only started this year with the Jammu & Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 and thereafter the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, but what was startling was a Forbes/Statista Infographic which showed 154 shutdowns in the country between January, 2016 to May, 2018 !! This is old data, when the phenomena of internet shutdowns was less noticeable, which can only make one wonder what the real time statistics would be right now !!

Update: Bloomberg Quint, in an Article titled “India’s Internet Shutdown Rules Need A Relook, Experts Say”, claims that there have been seventy seven internet shutdowns in the country this year up to October.