India’s Delhi High Court ruled Friday that the government can ban an entire messaging platform — not just remove harmful content from it — under emergency powers in Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, dismissing Telegram’s challenge to a nationwide block that has cut off more than 150 million Indian users since mid-June. The ruling, issued by Justice Tejas Karia, is the first time an Indian court has validated a full-platform block under Section 69A, and the legal logic it applies extends well beyond Telegram.
The ban was imposed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Telegram in the days before the NEET-UG 2026 medical entrance re-examination, scheduled for June 21. The National Testing Agency had recommended the block after criminal networks used Telegram channels — with names including “PAPER LEAKED NEET” and “Private Mafia” — to defraud approximately 1,500 medical school aspirants out of a combined ₹1.5 crore, selling fabricated paper leaks that never existed. The original NEET-UG exam, taken by 2.27 million candidates on May 3, was cancelled after investigators confirmed a genuine paper had leaked.
The fraud networks exploited a specific technical capability that made Telegram uniquely suited to their scheme. Telegram allows administrators to edit a message after it has been posted while preserving the original timestamp. Fraud operators built subscriber channels before the exam window, posted placeholder messages, and then edited those messages after the exam to insert exam-related content — making posts appear, by timestamp, to have been published before the exam. The deception was designed to retroactively validate the claim that a channel had access to leaked papers.
This mechanism explains the scope of MeitY’s response. The agency imposed not one order but two: a platform-wide block of Telegram in India until June 22, and a separate order requiring the platform to disable its message-editing feature for all Indian users through June 30 — eight days longer than the ban on access itself. The court explicitly noted that the message-editing feature “could also be misused to falsely suggest that exam papers had been leaked before the examination.”
Telegram told Justice Karia it had proactively removed more than 900 unlawful exam-content links and deployed artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to detect violations — arguing the scale of cooperation showed a full-platform block was disproportionate. The platform’s legal team invoked the four-part proportionality test from Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020), the Supreme Court ruling that established internet access as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution and required any restriction to meet tests of legitimate aim, rational connection, necessity, and least restrictive means.
The court was not persuaded. Justice Karia held that Telegram’s architecture — specifically its automated bot infrastructure, rotated channel handles, and audience migration capabilities — made entity-by-entity enforcement structurally impossible. A channel removed can reappear under a new name in minutes. The compliance record was not the issue; the architecture was. Telegram itself acknowledged in court affidavits that it had “limited ability to detect such content proactively.” “Therefore, it is evident that narrower measures, including the takedown of specific bots and channels, were ineffective having regard to the particular nature and architecture of the Telegram platform,” the court observed.
Read more: Telegram Challenges India’s NEET Ban in Delhi High Court Over Section 69A Limits
The ruling resolved a specific legal question that the existing text of Section 69A had left ambiguous: does the law’s power to block “information” extend to blocking the software platform that carries information?
Telegram had argued no. The government argued that Section 2(1)(v) of the IT Act defines “information” to include codes, computer programs, and software — and an app is software. The court accepted the government’s reading. An entire application, the bench held, falls within the statutory definitions of a “computer resource” and a “computer.” The government is empowered to block the platform, not just the content within it.
“R1 (Government) was empowered under Section 69A to direct blocking of access to Telegram. Test of proportionality is satisfied,” Justice Karia ruled. “The government’s measures are least restrictive. It cannot be held that the order is disproportionate.”
That expansion of Section 69A’s reach is the ruling’s most consequential element. Before June 19, the provision had been understood — and had been upheld by the Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) — as a content-blocking power. It now operates, under this reading, as a platform-blocking power. As one legal analysis published Friday observed: “A provision associated with specific content now reaches the platform that carries it. The same logic could extend to other networks, messaging services or storage apps.”
Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted messaging platforms share structural features with Telegram: pseudonymous identifiers, the ability to create new accounts rapidly, and encryption that makes monitoring specific content impossible without the platform’s cooperation. These are the same features the court cited as making targeted enforcement of Telegram structurally impossible.
The Internet Freedom Foundation, India’s leading digital rights advocacy organization, called the ban a “disproportionate, constitutionally incompatible response to exam fraud” and argued that Section 69A and the Blocking Rules of 2009 “do not extend to switching off an entire intermediary, still less to ordering a company to redesign its product by removing a feature for a whole country.” The product-feature order — mandating that Telegram disable message editing for all Indian users through June 30 — has no clear precedent under Section 69A jurisprudence, and the IFF has said it will offer a preliminary analysis of the ruling’s implications for the law of blocking.
For platform operators, the ruling signals that demonstrated cooperation with individual takedown requests does not protect a platform from a full block if a court accepts that the platform’s design makes complete targeted enforcement impossible. That standard is not unique to Telegram. It is the design standard of privacy-first messaging.
Read more: India Bans Telegram Over NEET Exam Fraud: 150 Million Users Lose Access for a Week
The case acquired an additional layer when Telegram CEO Pavel Durov publicly accused an Indian telecom operator of extending the ban’s reach beyond India’s borders through a technique called BGP hijacking. Border Gateway Protocol is the routing system that governs how data travels between global networks; a BGP hijack occurs when a network announces ownership of IP address ranges it does not control, causing traffic intended for the real owner to be redirected or dropped.
Durov posted on June 16 that an entity he identified as Reliance (associated with autonomous system number AS18101) was “sabotaging access to Telegram for millions of users OUTSIDE India (including the UAE) via a rogue method called BGP hijacking,” and advised network operators globally to reject unauthorized BGP announcements from AS18101.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited — the Reliance telecom entity with autonomous system number AS55836 — responded publicly, stating it “has not been involved in any such incident” and operates “in accordance with global Internet” standards. Reliance Jio’s autonomous system number differs from the one Durov cited, and network routing experts suggested the disruption may have been a routing error rather than deliberate interference. No independent technical analysis has confirmed or denied the specific claim.
What is not in dispute is the cross-border effect: Telegram users in the UAE and reportedly other countries outside India experienced service disruptions that no Indian court order authorized. BGP, by its design, lacks built-in mechanisms to constrain a routing announcement geographically. A domestic enforcement action can propagate globally if a carrier announces routes without proper filtering — a structural vulnerability that the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), the proposed cryptographic fix, is not yet widely deployed enough to prevent.
The immediate focus is Sunday, when 2.27 million candidates across India will sit the NEET-UG re-examination under elevated security measures. The Telegram ban is set to expire Monday, June 22. The separate order disabling message editing for Indian users runs through June 30.
The longer-term question is whether the June 19 ruling will face further challenge. The IFF has signaled continued scrutiny, and the Anuradha Bhasin precedent — which requires restrictions on internet access to be temporary, necessary, and proportionate — remains the framework through which Indian courts review such actions. The court in this case found the Telegram block satisfied that standard. Whether a future court reaches the same conclusion for a different platform, in a different context, using the same legal theory now on the books, is a question with a settled precedent on one side of the ledger.
The government called the ban a last resort, attempted after targeted takedowns failed. Telegram called it a punishment of 150 million ordinary users for the actions of a criminal minority. Both claims are factually supported by the record. The legal framework that the ruling created — and that will govern how India’s next enforcement action of this kind is evaluated — is new.
Can India ban Signal or WhatsApp using the same Section 69A ruling?
The June 19 ruling establishes that Section 69A permits a full-platform block when a court accepts that the platform’s architecture makes targeted content enforcement structurally impossible. Signal, WhatsApp, and other end-to-end encrypted services share the architectural features the Delhi High Court cited — pseudonymous identifiers, rapid account recreation, and encryption that prevents content monitoring. Whether India’s government would seek to apply the same reasoning to those platforms depends on political and legal choices that the ruling does not resolve, but the legal template now exists where it did not before. The Internet Freedom Foundation has warned this is precisely the precedent risk the ruling creates.
What is BGP hijacking, and why did Telegram’s CEO accuse a Reliance entity of it?
Border Gateway Protocol is the global routing system that directs internet traffic to its destination by having networks announce which IP address ranges they can reach. A BGP hijack happens when a network falsely announces it controls IP ranges it does not, causing traffic to be misdirected or dropped. Pavel Durov alleged that the entity behind autonomous system number AS18101 made unauthorized route announcements that caused Telegram to become unreachable for users in the UAE and elsewhere outside India — an effect no Indian court order authorized. Reliance Jio (AS55836, a different Reliance entity) has publicly denied involvement, and routing experts have suggested the disruption may have been a routing error. The allegation remains unconfirmed by independent technical analysis.
Was the Telegram ban effective at stopping NEET paper leaks?
The National Testing Agency confirmed that no genuine re-examination paper was ever in circulation — every channel claiming to sell one was running a fraud, not distributing real material. Telegram CEO Durov argued, and the Internet Freedom Foundation noted, that the ban failed to stop fraudulent content from moving to other platforms: WhatsApp and other apps saw an increase in fake paper-leak activity after the Telegram block took effect. The NTA cited the ban as necessary to prevent further fraud and protect exam integrity, while the court found it satisfied the least-restrictive standard under the circumstances.
What does the message-editing suspension mean, and why does it run longer than the platform ban?
A second MeitY order, separate from the platform ban, requires Telegram to disable its message-editing feature for all Indian users through June 30 — eight days after the platform ban expires on June 22. The order targets the specific mechanism fraud networks exploited: editing a posted message after the fact while preserving the original timestamp, which made posts appear to be pre-exam leaks when they were actually created after the exam. This order has no clear precedent under Section 69A, the Internet Freedom Foundation noted, and raises a distinct legal question: whether the government can direct a platform to modify its product features for an entire country’s user base under the same emergency blocking authority used to restrict platform access.
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