The Delhi high court on Friday upheld the government’s decision to block instant messaging service Telegram for six days ahead of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) reexam on Sunday, citing the emergency nature and sufficient grounds for the move.
Telegram had approached the high court on Thursday, challenging the Centre's temporary restrictions ahead of the June 21 re-examination. (Representative image)
Telegram was blocked days after the NEET-UG was rescheduled following the exam cancellation on May 12, even though 2.27 million students had taken it across 551 cities. The central agencies found that the question paper had been compromised. Questions were available on some phones as early as May 1, two days before the exam. It was the second time in two years that NEET-UG came under scrutiny
Telegram moved the court against the government's June 16 blocking order, calling it unconstitutional, arbitrary, and unlawful.
On Friday, Justice Tejas Karia said that the government's blocking order was founded on relevant material and did not suffer from any "non-application of mind", as Telegram alleged. He added that the content and information Telegram generates fall within the ambit of Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, which empowers the government to block access to online information, websites, or applications to protect national security, public order, and sovereignty.
Justice Karia orally noted that the test of proportionality has been satisfied. He added that the government has used the least restrictive method of temporarily blocking the application and “cannot be held to be disproportionate”.
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Justice Karia said there was no reason to exclude the platform from the ambit and scope of the IT Act. “Accordingly, [the] respondent [government] was empowered to issue directions to restrict public access to Telegram”.
The high court on Thursday asked the government whether it could stop the rights of 150 million people communicating through Telegram only because a set of people were appearing for an examination. During the proceedings, the court asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, “Can you block someone else’s right?”
The court remarked it was alive to what happened. "There were so many students who were affected. The second aspect is that, due to one incident, can you block the entire platform? There is a power that can be exercised. To what extent it can be exercised is the question”.
Mehta argued that the emergency measure of blocking the platform was taken as a last resort, as the application had “failed to effectively curb unlawful material” on the c hannels operating on its interface.
He said the government informed Telegram that several channels going by names such as “Private Mafia” with thousands of followers were operating on its platform, but it was failing to act against them.
In its affidavit, the government opposed Telegram’s petition, stating that the application’s features created a “unique ecosystem” that could be exploited for the dissemination of “exam leaks, cyber-enabled frauds, terrorist propaganda and other unlawful activities” on a scale that presented serious challenges for effective law enforcement and public interest.
The affidavit said Telegram's technical and architectural features distinguish it from other intermediaries and materially affect the ability to prevent, detect, and investigate unlawful activities on the platform.
It said that Telegram provided a dedicated bot infrastructure, enabling the creation and deployment of automated accounts capable of functioning without continuous human intervention.
The affidavit states Telegram reportedly disabled more than 150 bots associated with disseminating NEET-related content. "Such disclosure statements demonstrate that the bot ecosystem is capable of being exploited for the dissemination of examination-related material and other unlawful content on a large scale."
The affidavit said several other countries had taken regulatory, judicial, or administrative action against Telegram due to concerns related to encryption-based non-compliance, extremist or terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, copyright violations, and examination-related leaks.
“…Telegram’s combination of large subscriber capacity, anonymity features, cloud-based architecture, and ease of recreation of channels creates a persistent enforcement challenge, whereby unlawful examination-leak ecosystems can continue to operate notwithstanding individual takedown actions taken against specific channels or accounts,” the affidavit said.
It added that any delay in preventing information from being blocked would have led to “mass student unrest, disruption of public order and incitement to commissioning of cognisable offence”.
Senior advocate Dhruv Mehta, who appeared for Telegram, argued that the government’s order was arbi…
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