HC upholds order to block Telegram ahead of NEET

THe new delhi heights margaret court on fri upheld the regime’s decision to block instant messaging service Telegram for six days ahead of Sunday’s National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) re-exam. The court said there were sufficient reasons to arrive at the decision to protect the interests of millions of students appearing for the exam.A single-judge bench of Justice Tejas Karia, sitting as vacation judge, framed the case around two questions: whether the government’s order was vitiated by non-application of mind, and whether blocking the platform satisfied the test of proportionality — a question that itself turned on a more fundamental issue of statutory interpretation: does Section 69A of the Information Technology Act empower the government to block an entire platform, or only specific pieces of content? The court ruled against Telegram on both counts.The NEET-UG 2026, held on May 3, was cancelled on May 12 after overlaps emerged between a leaked guess paper and the actual one, triggering a CBI probe and 13 arrests.As the retest loomed, Telegram channels — some named “Private Mafia” and “PAPER LEAKED NEET” — sold fake question papers for up to ₹10 lakh, while administrators exploited the platform’s message-editing feature, which alters content without updating the timestamp, to fabricate post-exam “proof” of leaks, officials contended earlier in the week. Channel-by-channel takedowns kept failing as removed channels resurfaced through mirrors — the government’s stated reason for blocking the platform outright ahead of Sunday’s re-examination.The government’s interim order was issued on June 16 under Section 69A and directed Telegram and its associated URLs to be blocked across India till June 22, and ordered the platform to disable its message-editing feature till June 30. Following a hearing before a committee constituted under Rule 7 of the IT blocking rules on June 17, the secretary, ministry of electronics and information technology, passed a final order on June 18 confirming the interim directions — the order under challenge.Also Read:‘Curtailing rights of 150 million Telegram users as one set taking NEET retest?’: Delhi High CourtSenior advocate Dhruv Mehta, for Telegram, argued that Section 69A authorises blocking only specific “information,” not an intermediary’s platform in its entirety; that the order failed to record adequate reasons or independently assess proportionality; and that Telegram had substantially complied with content-specific takedowns, disabling 900 of 1,300 URLs flagged by the ministry.Relying on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India, he submitted that only the least restrictive measure was permissible, and that a platform-wide block disregarded the rights of more than 15 crore Indian users with no connection to exam fraud.Solicitor general Tushar Mehta and additional solicitor general Chetan Sharma, for the government, argued that Telegram’s architecture — cloud-based infrastructure, large public broadcast channels, an automated bot ecosystem, anonymised usernames and a message-editing function that retains the original timestamp — made content-specific enforcement structurally ineffective. They cited the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre’s record of seeking corrective measures from Telegram on at least 35 occasions since October 2024, and pointed to a channel called “NEET Mafia,” with about 18,000 subscribers, as an example of how removed channels resurfaced through mirror channels that redirected existing subscribers.Attorney general R Venkatramani, appearing for the government, submitted that “a profit-driven commercial platform cannot selectively rely upon proportionality to resist legitimate preventive measures adopted by the State in public interest.”Rejecting Telegram’s submission that Section 69A permits blocking only specific content, the court accepted the government’s reading that the law’s definition of “information” — which expressly includes “codes, computer programmes, software and databases” — is broad enough to cover a platform in its entirety, since an application is itself a compilation of code and software. “There is no reason to exclude an application or platform from the ambit of the said expression,” the court held, going on to find that the government was “empowered under Section 69A of the IT Act to issue directions for blocking public access to Telegram” as a whole.On proportionality, the court applied the four-part test laid down in Anuradha Bhasin — legitimate objective, rational nexus, necessity and the least restrictive measure — and found all four satisfied. “The platform architecture of Telegram is conducive to amplification and mass dissemination of content, enabling information to reach a substantial number of users within a short span of time,” the court said. “Consequently, any unlawful content, if circulated on Telegram, is capable of being amplified rapidly and is likely to give rise to a public order situation.”Entity-specific takedowns had “repeatedly” failed because removed channels reconstituted themselves through backup channels, rotated handles and burner accounts, the court found, making a time-bound platform block — confined to the period till June 22, with the editing restriction running till June 30 — the least restrictive option available given the imminence of the re-examination.On the non-application-of-mind challenge, the court held that the interim order’s reasoning, read with the detailed findings recorded in the final order after Telegram was heard, established “a direct and substantial nexus” between the directions issued and the reasons assigned.The final order’s reasoning drew, among other material, on a June 16 post by Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov on X, in which he said the company had “removed hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials” and was “making the ‘edited’ label more visible to prevent backdating scams.” The committee treated this as corroborating the scale of misuse the government had alleged, and as an acknowledgement that the existing “edited” label — which the company was now revising — had been inadequate. The court rejected Telegram’s argument that the final order, passed after a hearing, could not supply reasoning absent from the original interim order, holding that the two-stage process — an emergency interim direction followed by a post-decisional hearing and a reasoned final order — is precisely what Section 69A and the 2009 blocking rules contemplate.