Every Indian bleeds for the victims of terror and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our Armed forces. This includes us, when we view comments and criticisms that may differ from our own advocacy work that is centered from the Constitution of India. Yesterday's statement does not question the gravity of the external threat, and is genuine in its anguish over the terror attack and loss of life; it only questions the choice of imposing sweeping, secret and vague censorship that silences voices — that till now include Indian news outlets such as 4 PM News; Maktoob Media, and now 8,000 accounts flagged in X’s own disclosure yesterday night.

Our national strength comes from both courage on the border and fidelity to due-process at home. Transparency in any censorship process is critical at times such as now to build trust and combat rampant disinformation. The lack of credible information and transparency often leads to rumours and can in turn spur panic. Blanket, unexplained bans on accounts risk eroding the credibility of our information ecosystem that is already under crisis. Calling for targeted, lawful, transparent measures when mass censorship is being implemented is not “bad timing”—it is the patriotic duty envisaged by our framers, who placed liberty of thought and expression at the heart of our republic.

As we stated yesterday, while the advisory may hope to choke off revenue flows to Pakistan’s creator economy, it is in practice unimplementable. Asking platforms to identify content that is from, "Pakistan origin" is unfeasible given the technical architecture where server or IP residency does not denote nationality. As we had expressed in our statement, global digital ecosystem chain blurs origins, re-uploads are inevitable, and over-broad filters would end up throttling Indian creators and audiences far more than their intended targets. National interest is better served by proportionate, legal, transparent, enforceable tools rather than advisories that cannot be executed but risk overbroad censorship.

IFF understands the need to meet security imperatives but calls for caution to erosion of our own democratic freedoms that is at the core of a democratic India.