Why Delhi HC’s upholding of Telegram block has larger implications beyond ‘information’ itself

Section 69A lets the Centre block access to “information” where it is “necessary or expedient” on grounds that include public order. Section 2(1)(v) of the IT Act defines “information” to include data, codes, computer programmes, software, and databases.

The Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009, set out the procedure under Rule 8, which ordinarily requires a hearing before a block, and Rule 9, which lets the secretary issue an interim order first in an emergency with a hearing and then a confirmation by a committee constituted under Rule 7.

The National Testing Agency, which conducts the NEET exam, had first written to MeitY about Telegram’s alleged misuse on May 21. A meeting followed on June 3 and by June 9, MeitY sent Telegram a list of 1,300 URLs, of which the company says that it disabled around 900. The June 16 interim order was followed by a statutory committee (constituted under Rule 7 of the IT blocking Rules, 2009) hearing Telegram the next day, after which the committee confirmed the block on June 18.

Justice Tejas Karia, on the question of whether the order showed a non-application of mind, held that the order’s reasons were sufficient given its emergency character and that the later order confirming the block could add further reasoning rather than being limited to what the interim order said.

On whether the blocking of the whole platform instead of specific content was a proportionate response, the court held that the Centre’s argument on Section 69A’s definition of information, which includes “codes, computer programmes, software and data bases”, is wide enough to cover an app’s architecture, not just the posts on it. “There is no reason to exclude an application or platform from the ambit of the said expression,” the court said.

Previous disputes involving app blocking had not squarely addressed this question. Meghna Bal, director at the technology policy think-tank Esya Centre, told The Indian Express that the interpretation was not entirely unprecedented because Section 69A had previously been used to block Chinese applications. “The language in the IT Act is broad enough to encompass applications,” she said. “The novel context here is that it’s temporary and it was done in the interest of public order.”

The court then applied the four-part proportionality text from Anuradha Bhasin v. Union Of India (2020), holding that the block was necessary because other measures had been “repeatedly found to be ineffective and inadequate” and that its short duration made it “the least restrictive measure for achieving the stated objective”.

Bal asked whether the court had sufficient technical material before it while assessing alternatives to a platform wide restriction. “This is primarily a technology matter, as technology becomes an increasingly pervasive factor in judicial determinations, it is incumbent on the judiciary to reach out to external technology experts, particularly those from civil society, to get their inputs,” she said.

“There can be no effective system of democratic checks and balances if the judiciary merely takes the word of the State when making decisions, particularly when those decisions implicate fundamental rights,” she added.

Previous rulings

Courts haven’t had many chances to test platform-wide blocking against the least restrictive measure standard, and where they have, the results have cut both ways.

In 2024, the Delhi High Court upheld blocking of the messaging app Briar under Section 69A on national security grounds. The order noted that the provision could be used to block a “website/software/application” but did not separately examine whether an application itself falls under the definition of information under the IT Act.

In X Corp v. Union Of India (2023), the social media platform X argued in the Karnataka High Court that blocking orders should apply to individual tweets, not entire accounts. The court had sided with the government, separating lawful tweets from unlawful ones within an account was “impracticable and would not serve the statutory purpose”. It accepted account-wide blocking without running a four-part proportionality test of the kind the Telegram order now does.

In Tanul Thakur v. Union Of India, a satirical website called “Dowry Calculator” created by the journalist Tanul Thakur was blocked under Section 69A in 2018 without any notice given. Thakur spent years in the Delhi High Court simply trying to get a copy of the blocking order and a hearing, both of which the government resisted, citing the Blocking Rules confidentiality clause. By 2023, the court had moved the conversation towards a narrower fix, asking the government to consider unblocking the site if a disclaimer was added, rather than ruling on whether the original whole-site block was ever justified.

The clearest example of a full platform ban being walked backwards seen in April 2019, the Madras High Court’s Madurai bench ordered the Centre to block downloads of the short-form video platform TikTok entirely, citing pornography and child-safety concerns. The Supreme Court intervened within three weeks on appeal by ByteDance, the Chinese internet technology company ByteDance. The Madras High Court then vacated its own order, replacing the download ban with a narrower condition that the platform keep pornographic content off it, backed by the threat of contempt proceedings if it didn’t.

Questions that remain

The Delhi High Court accepted the Centre’s position that channel-specific takedowns had repeatedly failed because mirror channels, bots, and backup channels kept reappearing. Bal said that the reasoning leaves open practical questions about whether blocking one platform addresses the underlying problem.

“If the bad actors perpetuating exam fraud on Telegram were so persistent as to come up again and again, what is stopping them from merging on other platforms when Telegram is blocked?” she said.

She also questioned whether the temporary nature of the restriction says about the government’s own assessment of risk. “If Telegram is such a problematic presence, why is the ban temporary? Telegram or any other platform is a mode of dissemination. If tomorrow, it emerges that there is another leak, what will the authorities do then?”  

The significance of the judgment, according to her, is beyond Telegram itself. “The blocking of the platform implicates economic and civil freedoms,” she said, pointing to businesses that rely on such platforms to communicate with customers and market their services.

The order risks, according to her, treating the platform itself as the source of the problem “when actually the problematic communications being passed through it are symptoms of a deeper malaise”.