DHAKA: The Indian Government has blocked 32 websites in an effort to curb ISIS propaganda, prompting a wave of online protests.

An Indian ‘hacktivist’ group, Anonymous India, has threatened reprisal.

However, websites that had complied with the government order to remove objectionable content had been unblocked by Wednesday evening, sources said.

A confidential department of telecom order, dated December 17, instructing all internet service licensees to block the websites appeared online on Wednesday, reports the Times of India.

When contacted to verify the news, Dr Gulshan Rai, director of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) the directions had been issued to internet service providers following a Mumbai additional chief metropolitan magistrate’s November order directing the government’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) to implement the same.

He added that Mumbai's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) had approached the judiciary after interrogating Arif Majeed, a 23-year-old ISIS recruit from Kalyan.

More recently, Bengaluru professional Mehdi Biswas was arrested for allegedly spreading ISIS propaganda on Twitter.

The move met with opposition from the online community. While the tech community opposed the Github ban, others were upset about video-sharing websites like dailymotion.com and vimeo.com being taken down.

The list of websites in the DoT document was heavy on large text-sharing and collaboration websites, like Github and Pastebin, popular with coders and software developers.

BDST: 2046 HRS, JAN 01, 2015