NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel , Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio on Thursday suspended their mobile services, including voice and internet, in parts of Delhi for some time following a government directive in the wake of protests against a new citizenship law in the capital.According to a Delhi Police directive to the three private telcos as well as state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) earlier Monday, voice, SMS and internet services were asked to be shut down in the walled city areas of North and Central districts, Mandi House, Seelampur, Jaffarbad, Mustafabad, Jamia Nagar, Shaeen Bagh and Bawana between 9 AM and 1PM.Emerging from a pre-Budget industry-finance ministry meeting, Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal said the company had complied with the government directive. “There is a government order and we are just following it,” he told reporters.Vodafone Idea, from its official handle, also tweeted that it had complied with a government directive.“There is planned outage scheduled as per government directive. This will be rectified as soon as we receive the next directive from the authority,” Vodafone Idea tweeted from its official Twitter handle in response to a query on outage.Sources said Jio had also suspended their services in parts of Delhi between 9 AM and 1PM. Jio did not respond to ET's queries.Although the capital has seen violent protests over the last few days against the law, this was the first time that mobile networks were directed to clamp down their services.“It's really concerning that the capital city of the largest democracy in the world has shut the internet down and cut off its citizens from communicating.This is unprecedented and could have an irreversible and detrimental impact on India’s aspiration to become a digital leader,” said Mishi Choudhary, technology lawyer and managing partner of Mishi Choudhary and Associates.Mobile services though were not shut down in Karnataka, which imposed with Section 144, to quell protests opposing the amended citizenship law.According to reports there have been over 350 internet shutdowns in India since 2014.On December 19, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court issued notices to the government seeking its views on multiple challenges made on the Constitutional validity of the freshly enacted Citizenship Amendment Act ( CAA ), which grants fast track citizenship to non-Muslim refugees who fled to India due to religious persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.The government will have to place its views in the second week of January 2020. The Act was notified in the gazette on December 12, 2019, but it carries no date from when the Act would come into force.This will be notified by a subsequent notification, the gazette said.