Great to see you return to this week’s Politics to Policy edition. This week, we are going to talk about the controversial SAHYOG portal and the recent Telegram ban, and how it is one further case in the content-blocking culture that’s becoming the norm in India. Read on.

The Union Home Ministry of India issued an average of 290 content takedown notices every day between March 2024 and March 2025. In total, 1,11,185 pieces of online content were blocked under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology (IT) Act. Nearly a third of the 66 notices sent to X alone targeted content about Union Ministers and Central government agencies of India.

The same provision powering that daily flood of notices has since been stretched further. In June 2026, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued an emergency order under Section 69A blocking Telegram across India for six days, timed around the NEET-UG re-examination. The government's position was that organised cheating networks had been using the platform to circulate fabricated question papers, and that Telegram's architecture made targeted channel-level takedowns futile. A full platform block, it argued, was the only available instrument. The Delhi High Court upheld the order on June 19, 2026. In doing so, it resolved a question about Section 69A that had long been contested: the court held that an entire software platform qualifies as "information" under Section 2(1)(v) of the IT Act, since the statutory definition encompasses computer programmes and software. The government's blocking power, on this reading, reaches the entire intermediary, with 150 million Indian users on the receiving end. The court found the measure proportionate. What the SAHYOG portal represents at the level of administrative infrastructure, the Telegram ruling extends at the level of statutory interpretation: the legal architecture for content control in India is being built out, one judicial endorsement at a time.

These numbers tell a story that the government's stated justification for the SAHYOG portal does not fully account for.

SAHYOG, launched by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in October 2024 and operated by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), is a centralised portal through which government agencies issue takedown notices to social media platforms, telecom operators, internet service providers, and web-hosting companies. Thirty-eight intermediaries, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Telegram, have already signed on. X is the only major platform that pushed back, and in 2025, the Karnataka High Court dismissed its petition challenging the portal.

The dispute at the heart of SAHYOG concerns two sections of the IT Act that govern content takedowns in fundamentally different ways.

Section 69A is the constitutionally validated route. It allows the government to block content, but only on specific grounds such as national security and public order, and only through a defined procedure: a designated officer must approve the order, provide written justification, and the decision is subject to independent review. Users get an opportunity to be heard. The Supreme Court of India's 2015 ruling in Shreya Singhal versus Union of India affirmed Section 69A as the sole constitutionally valid framework for restricting online content.

Section 79 of the IT Act gives online platforms safe harbour protection, a legal shield that means a platform cannot ordinarily be held liable for content that a user posts on it. But Section 79(3)(b) creates an exception to it: if a government agency notifies a platform that content on it is being used to commit an unlawful act, and the platform fails to remove it quickly, the platform forfeits that legal shield.

The government built the SAHYOG portal on this particular exception. The logic it advances is that platforms are receiving administrative notices, and compliance is technically voluntary, in the legal sense that a platform chooses to act because non-compliance would cost it its legal immunity. The government insists the portal is purely an administrative tool for streamlining existing statutory obligations.

This distinction, however, matters less in practice than the government claims. When a platform learns it will lose its safe harbour protection for non-compliance, the incentive to comply becomes nearly absolute. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Telegram have all accepted this framework. When the world's largest platforms fall in line, the theoretical gap between a notice and an order disappears.

The Shreya Singhal ruling had specifically addressed Section 79(3)(b). The Supreme Court of India held that takedown directions under this provision could only follow a court order or a formal government notification, and had to remain anchored to the constitutional grounds in Article 19(2), as reflected in Section 69A. (Article 19 (2) empowers the State to impose "reasonable restrictions" on the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a)). SAHYOG empowers thousands of officials across Union and State governments, including local police, to issue notices through the portal. Section 69A centralises and limits this power. SAHYOG disperses and multiplies it.

X argued this amounted to a parallel and unlawful censorship regime. The Indian state High Court of Karnataka disagreed, endorsing the government's position that Sections 79 and 69A operate independently, and observing that "social media, as a modern amphitheatre of ideas, cannot be left in a state of anarchic freedom."

The metaphor is worth sitting with. An amphitheatre has an audience, performers, and a stage. In the government's preferred reading, it also has a curator with the authority to remove speakers, operating without any published criteria for what warrants removal.

The Delhi High Court's June 2026 ruling in the Telegram case adds another layer to this pattern. Where the Karnataka High Court endorsed SAHYOG as a parallel administrative channel operating outside Section 69A's procedural constraints, the Delhi High Court went further: it expanded what Section 69A itself authorises. By reading an entire software platform as "information" within the statutory definition, the court extended the provision's reach from specific content to the infrastructure carrying it. The government had engaged Telegram on at least 35 occasions since October 2024 before invoking the emergency block; the platform had complied with 900 of the 1,300 URLs it was asked to take down. The court still found a full platform ban proportionate. Taken together, the two rulings trace a consistent judicial direction: administrative channels are being widened and statutory language is being read in ways that extend state power beyond what the Shreya Singhal framework was designed to permit.

The absence of clear, narrow criteria for what constitutes unlawful content is where the governance reality becomes alarming. SAHYOG contains no objective threshold. In practice, this means that content about Union Ministers and Central government agencies accounts for a significant share of what gets flagged.

Cybersecurity is a real and legitimate state obligation. The government is correct that the scale of online crime in India demands coordinated, faster response mechanisms. CERT-In recorded 29.44 lakh cybersecurity incidents in 2025, up from 20.41 lakh in 2024. A platform for coordinating responses between law enforcement, social media companies, and telecom providers addresses an actual problem.

At the same time, the same infrastructure handling genuine cybercrime notices is also being used to suppress politically inconvenient content. These two functions belong in separate categories, but the architecture of SAHYOG treats them as one.

Free expression of speech and thought is a structural feature of a functioning democracy. A government that can issue 290 takedown notices a day, with no appeal mechanism, no independent review, and no obligation to give users the opportunity to be heard, has accumulated administrative censorship power on a scale that existing constitutional safeguards were designed to prevent.

Citizens carry responsibility for what they publish. When content causes real harm, when it incites violence, enables fraud, or constitutes clear cybercrime, the state has both the authority and the obligation to act. That power, however, must be bounded and the Shreya Singhal judgment established those bounds for a reason.

What SAHYOG has done, and what the Karnataka High Court has allowed to stand, is to route around the procedurally safeguarded framework and replace it with an unaccountable administrative channel operating at an industrial scale. It is worth remembering that a democracy that functions through the suppression of inconvenient speech eventually stops functioning as a democracy at all.

The government has built a content regulation machine. The question its citizens are entitled to ask is: who regulates the machine?

Thank you for reading through.

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Anas Ahmad Tak