New Delhi: Central Delhi comes under an unprecedented 24-hour mobile internet block from 10 pm tonight ahead of the planned protest on October 10 for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.The order was communicated by a post made by news agency ANI, of a letter to internet service providers Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Jio and MTNL, by Manishi Chandra, the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi Police (Special Cell). The letter was marked ‘top secret’.It says that mobile internet services will be blocked within a four km radius from the Janpath-Kartavya Path crossing.As the Internet Freedom Foundation observes in a statement, the communication describes a circle of about 50 square kilometres across the centre of the capital, which takes in Jantar Mantar, Connaught Place, India Gate, Parliament, the Supreme Court, the Delhi High Court, New Delhi Railway Station and hospitals including Ram Manohar Lohia and Lady Hardinge.This is about seven times the area of the suspension ordered around Jantar Mantar on 2 October, and it runs for twice as long.The shutdown will go on till 10 pm on October 10 2026.The IFF has stressed that this unpublished order is contrary to the law declared by the Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, in which the court held that “an order, particularly one that affects lives, liberty and property of people, must be made available”.Crucially, it noted that available research is to the contrary as a 2019 study of shutdowns and protest in India by Jan Rydzak, then at Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator, found shutdowns “much more strongly associated with increases in violent collective action than with non-violent mobilization”.