The Ordinance You'd Have to Sign Tonight

The Law You'd Have to Sign Before You're Ready

Imagine you are the official whose desk this lands on: an emergency draft ordinance to criminalise doxxing, ready for your signature tonight, after a week in which women who marched at Jantar Mantar had their addresses and phone numbers published online and began receiving rape and death threats.

Sign it tonight and you close a real gap immediately - India currently has no dedicated doxxing law, only a patchwork of stalking, intimidation and privacy provisions never built for coordinated digital pile-ons. Every day the gap stays open, another victim has to piece together a case from statutes designed for other harms.

But an ordinance drafted in a week, without full deliberation, risks defining "publishing personal information to cause harm" so broadly that it also criminalises investigative journalists naming a corrupt official's assets, whistleblowers exposing a public figure's conduct or citizens sharing a politician's publicly available address to organise a protest.

A law rushed to protect today's victims can become tomorrow's tool to silence dissent - and once passed, it is far easier to misuse than to repeal. Wait for the fuller legislative process instead and you protect against that overreach - proper consultation, a clear definition distinguishing malicious targeting from public-interest disclosure, safeguards for journalists and whistleblowers.

But "wait" is not a neutral word here. It means the women currently navigating BNS Sections 78 and 351 for a crime that doesn't formally exist by that name keep navigating it and the next coordinated pile-on has no better legal footing than this one did.

This is not a choice between protecting citizens and delaying paperwork. It is a choice about whose harm you are willing to risk: the harm of continued, undefined vulnerability for doxxing victims or the harm of a hastily drafted law that could later be turned against the very civic participation - protest, journalism, whistleblowing - that a healthy democracy depends on.

The resolution is not to sign the emergency ordinance as drafted, nor to shelve it for a future session. It is to invoke emergency interim measures that are narrow by design - mandatory platform takedown within hours for content combining identifying information with explicit threats, using the existing IT Rules framework - while committing publicly, with a fixed timeline, to full legislative drafting of a proper anti-doxxing law with journalist and whistleblower carve-outs.

This costs something too: it will feel too slow to the woman receiving threats tonight and too rushed to the civil liberties lawyer worried about six months from now. But the alternative - a permanent law built in a week under public pressure - has historically produced exactly the kind of overbroad, weaponisable statute that ends up harming the speech it never intended to touch.

The state's duty here is not to choose the fastest response or the most cautious one; it is to choose the response whose damage, if it turns out to be wrong, is reversible.