India’s brief experiment with forcing a state-run cybersecurity app ~ the Sanchar Sathi App ~ onto every new smartphone has revealed a deeper tension at the heart of our digital governance: a widening gap between the intent to secure citizens and the methods used to achieve it. The swift withdrawal of the directive, after intense public pushback, shows that Indians understand the stakes of digital rights ~ and that the government underestimated both the sensitivity of the issue and the sophistication of its critics. The app in question, designed to help users report fraud, block stolen devices and verify handset authenticity, is not inherently problematic.

In a country with more than a billion mobile connections and a flourishing market for cloned or illegally resold phones, tools that st

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