In the first seventy-two hours after it was published, a two-minute video accumulated 2.6 million views on Instagram. The video, posted on May 19, 2026, by the Environmental Reporting Collective, showed what happens when one of the world’s largest technology companies arrives to build a data centre in a village where Dalit families had been allocated land decades earlier. It showed farmers resisting. It showed acquisition pressure. It showed Pyla Kondamma, a Dalit farmer and former village council head, speaking plainly:
“They are not touching land owned by dominant castes. Only Dalit land.”
Three days later, on May 22, 2026, the video vanished from India’s Instagram. Meta did not remove it for misinformation. Did not flag it as misleading. Did not respond to a copyright claim. Instead, the company invoked Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, a law that reads like a neutral intermediary liability clause — the kind of technical provision that global platforms incorporate into content moderation as a basic legal precaution. Yet in India, this provision has become something else entirely: a mechanism for simultaneous economic and epistemic erasure, allowing the state to erase both Dalit land ownership and Dalit voices narrating that erasure.
The restriction was not isolated. Between May 19 and May 31, at least 20 videos from 11 different accounts critical of the proposed Google-Adani data centre near Visakhapatnam were blocked on Instagram. Some documented displacement. Others raised environmental concerns about water resources and forest cover. The government notices cited Section 79(3)(b) without detailing which unlawful act the content was promoting. The Environmental Reporting Collective, Human Rights Forum, and independent journalists received no opportunity to contest the removal, only notification of it, after the fact, through a centralized government portal that has transformed Section 79(3)(b) from a conditional safe harbour into an automated censorship system.
What makes this caste-legible is not the text of the law. It is how the law operates in practice, in a social formation where Dalit communities remain the group least likely to own land in India. In Visakhapatnam district, 68 percent of Dalit households own no land at all. This is not incidental to the story of the Visakhapatnam data centre. It is the story’s foundation. When the Andhra Pradesh government allotted 480 acres for Google’s 1-gigawatt AI campus in December 2025, the land it selected included 200 acres in Tarluvada village, land allocated to Dalit families in the 1970s through a special state programme designed to provide land to the landless. Decades later, that same land became valuable to global capital. The state began acquisition pressure. Families reported being coerced into sales. And when Dalit farmers and human rights organizations documented the displacement and published it on social media, a government that claims to operate under the rule of law invoked a content removal statute to erase the record of dispossession.
The brilliance, if one can call it that, of using Section 79(3)(b) as a censorship tool is that it avoids the procedural safeguards required under other Indian laws. Section 69A of the IT Act, which explicitly governs content takedowns, requires government agencies to justify removal orders and provide platforms with detailed legal grounds. Intermediaries can, in theory, challenge. Users can seek recourse. But Section 79(3)(b) treats the notification as an automatic trigger. No scrutiny required. No transparency mandated. When X challenged this in court in 2025, arguing that Section 79(3)(b) does not empower government officers to independently issue blocking orders and that the government’s “Sahyog” portal amounts to exactly that, a single judge of the Karnataka High Court dismissed the plea in September 2025, holding that Sahyog was merely a facilitation tool and that binding blocking power remained under the separate, more procedurally constrained Section 69A. That was not the end of it: X appealed to a division bench, and on July 22, 2026, the Supreme Court stepped in and stayed every pending High Court challenge to Sahyog and Section 79(3)(b), including X’s, Kunal Kamra’s, and the DigiPub News India Foundation’s, to hear the constitutional questions itself rather than let different High Courts rule on the same law separately. The question of whether Section 79(3)(b) can lawfully do what it did to the Visakhapatnam videos is, as of this writing, unresolved and sitting before India’s highest court — not settled the way the single-judge ruling first made it look. What is not in dispute is that the section has, in practice, become the mechanism through which the state enforces takedowns with little friction and no requirement to publish its reasoning.
The double bind this creates for Dalits is not accident. It is architecture. As Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly, formal political rights without substantive power to exercise them amount to a “top dressing” on undemocratic soil. A Dalit farmer has the formal right to document her dispossession. She has the constitutional liberty to speak. The law says no caste discrimination. But when she attempts to narrate her own loss, when she appears in a video that reaches millions, a state acting under cover of neutral content moderation law simply erases her. She does not get to argue her case. The platform does not publish the government’s justification. The video does not disappear because it is false; it disappears because it makes visible what the state prefers to keep invisible.
This is what tech capital’s appetite for peripheral land now requires: not just the ability to dispossess, but the ability to dispossess silently. When the Andhra Pradesh government acquired land from dominant-caste owners for earlier development projects, those acquisitions could be protested, documented, and resisted in the public sphere. Newspapers carried stories. Citizens could organize. Democratic procedure, however flawed, remained available as a check. But the twenty-first-century model of dispossession combines two instruments: administrative procedure that appears neutral, and digital infrastructure that silences contestation. The farmer who owns the land can be acquired. The journalist who documents the acquisition can be censored. The video that shows resistance can be erased. All through the operation of seemingly technical, colour-blind law.
The irony, and the outrage, is that governments and platforms present these removals as neutral moderation. Meta did not say it was suppressing Dalit voices in service of tech capital and caste hierarchy. Instead, it invoked a statute. It followed procedure. It operated transparently by its own low standards, publishing a notice that the content violated Indian law. The law itself, however, is now a mechanism of caste violence. Not because it names caste. Because it operates in a social reality where Dalit land is systematically vulnerable to appropriation and Dalit attempts to narrate that appropriation are systematically vulnerable to erasure.
What does justice require in response? At minimum, transparency: government agencies must publish the specific legal grounds for removal orders, and intermediaries must retain authority to challenge them. But something deeper is required as well. Courts must recognize that Section 79(3)(b), as presently weaponized, functions as a caste-based censorship mechanism, not neutral procedure, but procedure co-constituted with caste hierarchy. And Dalit communities must reclaim the right to narrate their own dispossession, not through the grace of platforms or government, but through independent infrastructure, print, and organized speech that no intermediary can so easily erase.
The video of Pyla Kondamma still exists. It has been downloaded, shared, archived. But the fact that the state felt compelled to suppress it, to remove it from the world’s largest social platform, is itself a kind of confession. It reveals that formal democracy in India is still deeply bound to caste, that land theft requires epistemic theft to succeed, and that Dalit substantive power remains unfinished business. The government’s silence, enforced by law, is what we must all now speak into.
