On 16th June,2026, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) temporarily blocked access to Telegram for 6 days, denying approximately 150 million users’ access to the platform. This decision came in the wake of the controversial National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) question paper leaks. NEET UG, the nationwide entrance exam for medical undergraduate courses, was cancelled, and re-exams were called after investigations revealed that the question papers had been leaked before the exams.

The central government argued that the leak and dissemination of the paper were being facilitated through Telegram. There were also Telegram groups that, according to the government, defrauded students by claiming access to additional leaked papers. To mount a robust counter, it was argued that the platform would have to be blocked until the NEET UG re-examination is conducted on 21st June 2026. A second direction issued along with the blocking order required disabling the message-editing function on Telegram until 30th June. The Delhi High Court upheld the blocking order, citing that the government had followed procedure and that the temporary blocking was constitutionally proportional.

This episode was not an isolated one. Whether it is confronting misinformation, public protests, political speech, or examination fraud, states have increasingly treated blocking and disruption of digital platforms as an appropriate regulatory response to any inconvenience they face.

This essay argues that the telegram ban marks a qualitative shift in how the state views Internet regulation, not merely because it permits platform-wide blocking under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Rather, it marks a deeper shift in India’s model of digital regulation from governing intermediaries through safe-harbour obligations to disabling the intermediary itself. Read alongside recent Section 69A jurisprudence, the decision reveals an incremental constitutional expansion of executive blocking powers that has largely escaped judicial scrutiny.

Platform Governance and the Logic of Safe Harbour

India’s digital regulatory framework has been built around governing intermediaries rather than disabling them. Section 79 of the Information Technology Act provides platforms with a safe harbour provision that protects the intermediaries from liability for third-party content, as long as they follow due diligence requirements and respond expeditiously upon actual knowledge of unlawful content. The Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, further expand on this, including compliance officers, grievance redressal mechanisms, notice-and-takedown timelines, nodal contacts for law enforcement, and traceability requirements for messaging services. Even though these rules have been criticised for misappropriating due diligence under the safe harbour provision to hamper free speech on these platforms, they are bound by the architecture of platform governance over elimination.

This is where the Telegram episode reveals an internal tension within this framework. Telegram, upon government notification, removed over 900 flagged links and used proactive detection tools to do so. This is exactly the kind of intermediary conduct that Section 79 requires. However, the central government claimed that Telegram’s compliance was insufficient to prevent fraud networks from returning, given the platform’s architecture, which allowed mirror channels and bot ecosystems to regenerate almost immediately after takedowns. The block was therefore not an escalation within the platform governance framework but a departure from it. The second direction makes this shift clearer. Ordering Telegram to disable its message editing feature till June 30th was a directive to modify the platform’s technical design. The central government argued that the feature enabled fraud actors to alter posts after the examination while preserving the original timestamp, fabricating evidence of pre-examination leaks. The state contested that the remedy was required. Section 69A authorises the blocking of public access to information. It does not, on its face, authorise the government to compel a platform to alter how its software functions.

Blocking as Governance: When the Medium Becomes the Target

Although banning an entire platform for 6 days is new, the Telegram episode fits within the broader pattern of Indian digital governance. One that reflects two distinct logics of blocking.

The first is its use as a blunt instrument: disabling infrastructure to manage public disorder or administrative embarrassment. Kashmir saw an internet shutdown of over one year following the central government’s revocation of its constitutional autonomy. Manipur sustained internet shutdowns owing to ethnic violence, which erupted in 2023, suppressing documentation of atrocities rather than preventing them. During the farmers’ protest and the CAA agitations, parts of Haryana and Delhi experienced Internet shutdowns. There were also several internet shutdowns owing to local protests and to conduct an entrance exam. In each case, the state disabled the medium because the medium made the problem visible. The telegram block belongs to this category- examination fraud was the justification, but the platform bore the consequence, even though it had no part in the crime.

The second is more deliberate and concentrated. The government has repeatedly used section 69A to block accounts of journalists, activists, news portals, and other critical voices to remove inconvenient speech from public view; in these cases, the target was the message and not the medium. In this Instance, Telegram blocking has been conducted through the same pathway used to block accounts and posts. Section 69A does not distinguish between the two.

The greater difficulty with the government’s reasoning is that question paper leaks, like most forms of online criminal activity, are not confined to a single platform. These networks operate across messaging services and social media platforms simultaneously. Blocking Telegram does not remove the underlying networks. It merely displaces such networks to parallel platforms. A regulatory logic premised on restricting the infrastructure through which harm is communicated, rather than the actors who produce it, will therefore generate an endless series of platform-specific confrontations without resolving the underlying problem.

Yet the significance of the Telegram episode is not limited to its practical shortcomings, but the fact that this new governance model has received judicial recognition. The Delhi High Court’s judgment in Telegram’s challenge to the orders makes this logic explicit in constitutional doctrine: the court held that Section 2(1) (v) of the Information Technology Act, which defines information to include codes, computer programmes and software, is broad enough to encompass an entire messaging platform. In doing so, it accepted that “software” can encompass entire platforms as well. The blocking power, conceived by the Supreme Court in the case of Shreya Singhal vs UOI as a narrowly tailored tool for removing specific unlawful content, has now been extended to reach the platform that carries it.

The State’s position as well as justification for this new approach is made clear through the Attorney General’s submissions in the case. He argued that a platform “structurally incapable of ensuring accountability” cannot invoke proportionality in its own defence. This reasoning essentially converts the platform’s design choices into legal liabilities. Features like end-to-end encryption, pseudonymity, resistance to centralised moderation, and resilient channel architecture become evidence of a structural defect that removes safe harbour.[1]

The Emerging Constitutional Contradiction

To say that the telegram episode has introduced a constitutional problem would be disingenuous, but it has clearly shown how far the existing one has travelled. India’s blocking regime has long operated by substituting procedural compliance for substantive review. What the present case adds is a demonstration of what that substitution looks like when the power being exercised is categorically larger than the one the procedure was designed to constrain.

Shreya Singhal’s validation of Section 69A rested on the assumption that blocking would target identifiable, discrete pieces of content. The Delhi High Court’s Telegram judgment applies the same framework to a platform-wide block affecting 150 million users without asking whether safeguards designed for a scalpel remain adequate when wielded as a cleaver.

The escalation has been incremental, and at each step judicially absorbed without scrutiny of the underlying merits. The Karnataka High Court, in X Corp vs UOI, 2023, established that account-level blocking was permissible. The subsequent X Corp vs UOI, 2025, legalised the safe harbour provision as a parallel blocking pathway and the centralised portal for publishing blocking orders. Now the Telegram judgment establishes that platform-level blocking is permissible. The procedural shell remains nominally intact across all the cases. What has changed is the magnitude of the power it contains, and that change has gone unexamined.

This matters because the court’s own mandate demands more. In Anuradha Basin vs UOI, 2020, the Supreme Court made it clear that the Internet is a medium through which fundamental rights are exercised, and any restriction must satisfy the test of necessity and must be the least restrictive means available. The Telegram orders satisfy neither. The Delhi High Court held that the six-day time limit on blocking was within the proportionality standard, as the block was time-bound and event-linked. But a deadline is not a proportionality analysis, and it asserts that a right can be limited within a time frame. It says nothing about whether restricting it in the first place was the minimum necessary intervention. Another problem was that the government’s claim of inefficiencies in alternative actions, such as targeted takedowns and criminal prosecution of the fraud networks, was accepted at face value without scrutiny of the evidentiary basis for the claim. The mere fact that Telegram could be accessed through VPNs and the fraudulent groups migrated to parallel platforms shows that the measure was overboard. The judgment is equally silent on the independent legal basis for the direction to disable the message editing function on Instagram until the 30^th of June. The Court confirmed both orders collectively without ever asking whether Section 69A, a provision authorising the blocking of public access to information, extends to ordering a platform to alter how its software functions.

The deeper contradiction is one that the judiciary has created for itself. Indian Courts have increasingly elevated the constitutional status of digital access, yet applied less scrutiny as restrictions on that access have grown. It can be safely said that the courts have categorically allowed these restrictions. This inversion is not an oversight. It is a structural feature of how Indian digital constitutionalism has developed, and the Telegram judgment is its clearest expression yet.

Concluding Remarks

The Telegram ban lasted for only 6 days. The constitutional consequences will last longer. The Delhi High Court’s expansion of Section 2(1)(V) of the IT Act to cover entire platforms, and its finding that the action is legal because the government followed procedure without engaging in substantive review, does not expire when the block is lifted. The next time the government seeks to block a platform, it will rely on this judgment, which has purchased it a durable expansion of power.

Indian digital constitutionalism now faces a compounding problem. The tools of internet restriction have grown more powerful with each judicial endorsement. The occasions on which they are deployed have grown less exceptional. And the scrutiny applied to each new use has grown thinner. What began as a narrowly tailored power to address specific unlawful content has, over a decade of incremental expansion, become a generalised instrument of crisis management available to the executive whenever it needs to be seen doing something. This new episode has just further expanded this growing power.

Rahul Pallipurath is a Graduate Research Fellow at the JSW Centre for the Future of Law, National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, whose research focuses on the intersection of law and emerging technologies.

[1] Para 15, 2026 DHC 5145, Telegram FZ LLC & Anr. vs Union of India & Ors.