More likely: the government doesn't want to cause 'too much' discomfort among ordinary citizens. The decision to not block popular apps such as WhatsApp is probably purely political.
This! I've yet to meet an Indian who doesn't have WhatsApp and we all know that pretty much every Indian with a phone uses it. We're not talking about a little discomfort, we're talking a lot. There's almost half a billion users. Government can't bad WhatsApp without a major freakout, so they're going after small players. It wasn't long ago that even Signal AND WhatsApp were pushing back against these laws and what resulted is more Signal downloads (tens of millions of users in India)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/289778/countries-with-th...
Literally everyone in India is using WhatApp. If the government decided to shut it down, all government offices would be on fire within hours.
Isn't that what I am saying too? We accept the huge discomfort because we feel it is important and in our national interest! However important WhatsApp is, it is just a platform. If it is killed by a ban, people will just migrate to another platform and that's a lot more easier to do than give up on the benefits of flying by air. The only reason WhatsApp is allowed to function is because they are willing to provide a backdoor to the indian government - and that's easy to do when all the communication goes through their server and they handle the keys.
In today's context with WhatsApp, The sun never rises without a billion GOOD MORNING messages and another billion GOOD MORNING TO YOU TOO replies on WhatsApp in India /s
You propose to abandon them?
Which is to artificially maintain the duty free market.