NEW DELHI — India’s government has spent years threatening to ban messaging apps that do not comply with its demands. This week, it tried something different. Instead of threatening to block Telegram or Signal again, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology sent formal notices asking both platforms why they should be allowed to keep a specific feature.
The feature in question is usernames, the ability to create a handle that lets other users reach you without sharing your phone number. Telegram has offered this for years. Signal introduced it more recently, as an optional alternative to phone-number-based contact. On Thursday, MeitY asked both companies to explain why the feature exists, what risks it creates, and what safeguards they have put in place against fraud and impersonation. The notices, confirmed by a government source to Reuters, arrived one day after the same ministry directed Meta’s WhatsApp to pause the rollout of its own username feature in India.
The government’s stated concern is practical: phone numbers are traceable. Usernames, which allow users to communicate without disclosing identifying contact information, remove one of the last threads law enforcement can follow to the source of scams. MeitY has specifically cited what it calls “digital arrests,” a form of online extortion in which criminals impersonate police officers or tax officials and threaten victims with prosecution unless they pay, as part of the rationale for the inquiry. Officials believe that username-based contact, by severing the link between an online persona and a registered mobile number, makes those scams harder to investigate and easier to conduct at scale.
India’s most recent regulatory action against Telegram was not a notice but a ban. On June 16, acting on a request from the National Testing Agency, MeitY invoked Section 69A of the Information Technology Act to block Telegram nationwide. The agency had cancelled NEET UG 2026, the national entrance examination for medical school, after discovering that examination questions had been circulating on the platform before the test. The block lasted until June 22, when MeitY restored access. The Delhi High Court, in a closed session on June 19, rejected Telegram’s constitutional challenge and upheld the temporary block. Neither the ban nor its lifting produced a clear resolution: the platform was restored, but the examination fraud that prompted the action remained under investigation.
The username inquiry is narrower in scope but potentially wider in implication. A ban blocks access to an entire platform; a feature inquiry is an invitation to platforms to justify individual design decisions to the state, or to redesign those features for the Indian market specifically. The Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organization that has tracked MeitY’s expanding regulatory activity, described the notices in stark terms. “This is a dragnet,” it said. “It is widening, and it has no basis in law.”
That legal critique is pointed. India’s IT Rules, updated in 2021 and revised in 2023, give MeitY broad authority to require platforms to respond to government inquiries, appoint local grievance officers, and comply with content removal orders. What they do not specify is any authority to require platforms to eliminate or modify features the government finds inconvenient. Whether a notice asking Telegram to justify the continued availability of its username feature constitutes a lawful exercise of that regulatory framework, or an overreach, is a question neither MeitY nor the platforms had clarified by Thursday evening.
Signal’s position in this inquiry is particularly notable. The platform exists almost entirely as a privacy tool. Its username feature was designed to let users communicate securely without sharing their phone numbers with people they do not fully trust, a use case that includes journalists, lawyers, activists, and human rights workers operating in environments where their contacts can be identified and targeted. The government’s framing of the feature as a fraud risk treats the same capability as a threat.
India has more active WhatsApp users than any other country on earth, and Telegram’s base there runs into the hundreds of millions. The scale gives MeitY genuine leverage. WhatsApp had previously resisted MeitY’s traceability demands, requirements that would have compelled it to break end-to-end encryption to allow message origin disclosure, before eventually building a separate technical architecture for the Indian market. Meta has developed a pattern of geographic differentiation on privacy questions, complying with European regulatory demands while maintaining more expansive data practices elsewhere. Whether Telegram and Signal will follow a similar path, creating versions of their anonymity features that work differently in India than in the rest of the world, is among the most consequential questions the notices have raised.
For now, neither Telegram nor Signal had issued a public response. India’s digital credibility has separately come under scrutiny this week after a ransomware group stole and published Apple’s unreleased iPhone specifications from Tata Electronics, with the country’s computer emergency response team opening an investigation. That context gives MeitY some domestic political incentive to be seen acting decisively against online fraud. What the notices have not resolved is whether the authority being exercised against Telegram and Signal’s feature design decisions is the appropriate legal instrument for doing so, or whether the inquiry is, as the Internet Freedom Foundation argues, a dragnet that has no basis in the law.
