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Delhi High Court Upholds Telegram Ban Ahead of NEET Re-Exam
Judge sides with the government, ruling that blocking an app used by 150 million Indians passed every test for a proportionate response.
India's biggest court fight over the Telegram ban this week ended exactly where the government wanted it to: with a judge agreeing that shutting down one of the world's most popular messaging apps for ordinary citizens was a reasonable price to pay for protecting a single high-stakes exam.
The Delhi High Court on Friday threw out a legal challenge brought by Telegram FZ LLC against the federal government's order blocking the app nationwide through June 22, days before millions of students are due to retake the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, on June 21. The re-examination was ordered after concerns surfaced that this year's paper had been compromised, and authorities argued that Telegram's design made it uniquely dangerous as a vehicle for spreading fabricated leak claims around the test.
Justice Tejas Karia, who delivered the ruling, found that the government had followed proper procedure under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, the law that allows authorities to order intermediaries blocked in the interest of public order. The judge rejected Telegram's argument that it deserved a detailed written explanation before being shut out of the country, ruling that the urgency of the situation justified the streamlined process the government had used.
Central to the court's reasoning was a four-part legal test for proportionality that the Supreme Court laid down years earlier in a case involving internet shutdowns in Jammu and Kashmir. The Delhi High Court concluded the Telegram block cleared all four bars, calling it a narrowly tailored, temporary step rather than a permanent or excessive one.
The judgment leaned heavily on technical features that the court said set Telegram apart from ordinary chat apps: large public channels, automated bots that can push out content with no human at the keyboard, hidden phone numbers, and — most significantly — message editing with no time limit. Government lawyers argued the editing feature could let someone quietly swap a file inside an old message, then point to the timestamp as proof an exam paper had leaked before students sat for it, even though the substitution happened only after the test ended.
The court agreed that risk was serious enough to justify a separate, additional order disabling Telegram's edit function specifically for NEET-related content through the end of June. It also accepted the government's warning that taking down a single problematic channel would not solve much, since a near-identical replacement channel or bot could be spun up almost immediately, letting the same misinformation campaign continue under a new name.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the central government, told the bench that blocked bots can simply mirror themselves into a fresh bot automatically, making channel-by-channel takedowns a losing game of whack-a-mole. That argument echoed an earlier finding from the same court that Section 69A gives authorities power to block an entire platform outright, not merely specific posts or channels found unlawful.
Telegram pushed back hard, telling the court it had already removed more than 900 links connected to unlawful NEET-related material and had deployed AI and machine-learning tools to catch this content before it spread. The company's founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, argued publicly that the shutdown punishes more than 150 million ordinary Indian users for the actions of a small number of people allegedly behind the original leak.
That tension surfaced inside the courtroom too. During the hearing, the judge had put the question to the government's counsel fairly pointedly. In the end, though, the court sided with the government's position that the scale of potential disruption to a national entrance exam — and the risk of triggering a fresh public-order crisis if rumors of another leak took hold — outweighed the inconvenience to the wider user base for a few days.
The blocking order traces back to recommendations from the National Testing Agency and the Department of Higher Education, which both flagged Telegram as a primary channel through which leak rumors and unverified exam material were circulating ahead of the re-test. With the court's blessing now secured, the platform will remain inaccessible in India through June 22, with editing restrictions on exam-related content lingering a week longer, until June 30.
The case, formally titled Telegram FZ LLC & Anr v. Union of India & Ors, is likely to be cited going forward whenever Indian authorities consider blunt, platform-wide shutdowns rather than narrower content removal during future exam-related panics or public-order concerns.
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