Listen to this article:

The protest at Jantar Mantar ended on July 25 with the resignation of former education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The crackdown did not end with it. Its second phase is not being run by the police. It has been outsourced to a distributed swarm of social media accounts and targets girls and women who went to protest.

Out of anger and frustration, protesters of all genders shouted expletive-laden slogans at Jantar Mantar. A few days after the protest was withdrawn, hardline accounts targeted girl students or women, using cropped and AI-fabricated images with captions such as ‘Find her. She abused Prime Minister Narendra Modi.’

Many handles and individuals from the organisation backed by the current government, such as The Jaipur Dialogues and others, posted a series of close-up, cropped photographs identifying individual women protesters. One account asked followers to publish two young women’s home addresses, colleges and workplaces so that “neighbours, colleagues and classmates” could be informed.

Maharashtra’s cyber authority alone flagged 429 handles or posts allegedly spreading false or derogatory material around the protests, at least 140 of them produced with AI tools.

The state, meanwhile, supplied the other half of the machinery. Delhi Police registered an FIR over “derogatory, malicious and defamatory” content and asked X to delete the posts and hand over the account holders’ full names, addresses, contact details, email IDs and login/logout records with date and time stamps. Next, a 15-year-old girl was booked under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for a viral clip from the protest.

These developments indicate two systems and one output: The state provides the means to identify protesters and legal jeopardy, while the informal networks supply the shame, the doorstep visit and the phone call to the family. Alone, neither of these might work. Together, they produce a punishment the law never authorised and no court can review, because no single actor did anything a judge can name.

Women exclusively targeted

Why target women? Because in the name of decency, girls can be easily targeted in Indian society. Nothing happens if a man swears or abuses during a public speech or........

© The Wire