When Telegram users across India found the app inaccessible this month, it marked the latest entry in a six-year-old pattern - the Indian government invoking the same single provision of law to switch off access to a digital platform almost overnight. From the 2020 ban on TikTok to this year's action against Telegram, the legal mechanism has stayed constant even as the targets and stated reasons have evolved.
The legal basis: Section 69A
The power behind every one of these actions is Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, supported by the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009. Under these Blocking Rules, the government can enforce blocking in two ways depending on whether the situation is treated as a normal one or an emergency. In the regular process, a designated officer of at least Joint Secretary rank can issue a blocking direction, but only after a complaint has been forwarded to them by a nodal officer and examined by a Committee of Government Personnel. In emergencies, Rule 9 allows the government to bypass this layered review and act immediately, with the formal committee process following afterward rather than before.
Section 69A itself permits action only when blocking is 'necessary or expedient' on grounds including sovereignty and integrity of India, defence, state security, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order. The provision requires that reasons for blocking be recorded in writing, which in theory creates a paper trail that can be challenged in court, though Rule 16 of the Blocking Rules requires strict confidentiality around complaints and the actions taken on them, meaning the public rarely sees the underlying order.
2020: The TikTok template
The first large-scale use of this power against foreign apps came on June 29, 2020, when MeitY banned 59 Chinese applications, including TikTok, citing Section 69A read with the 2009 Blocking Rules. The government's press releases at the time cited 'raging concerns' over data security and the privacy of India's population, framing the apps' alleged data practices as a threat to national sovereignty. Officials said the action followed numerous complaints about apps being misused to steal and transmit user data outside India without authorisation, which they argued could be exploited by elements hostile to national security.
A second round followed on September 2, 2020, taking the total well past a hundred apps. By the government's own later account, the 2020 action was justified on grounds of sovereignty, security, and data privacy, and represented the first large-scale use of Section 69A against foreign apps.
That episode set the template legal critics still point to: a press release with little specific evidence against individual apps, a confidential underlying order, and a geopolitical backdrop, in 2020's case, the Galwan Valley clash with China, that observers argued was doing more work than the stated legal grounds.
2025: Scaling up, quietly
The same provision has since been used far more broadly and far less visibly. Between April 29 and May 15, 2025, MeitY issued three separate orders under Section 69A directing Google to remove more than 3,000 apps from the Play Store, according to reporting based on the orders. The list this time was unusually wide-ranging, covering VPN services, religious apps, streaming platforms, language tools, AI generators, and basic utilities like calculators and wallpaper apps, with a large share traced to developers in Pakistan amid heightened tensions following the Pahalgam terror attack. Disclosures of these orders briefly surfaced on the Lumen Database before officials withdrew them, with neither MeitY nor Google explaining the removal, underscoring how little transparency now accompanies even very large blocking actions.
2026: Telegram and a new legal stretch
The Telegram case differs from the Chinese-apps precedent in one important way: it targeted a single platform over a specific, time-bound trigger rather than a sweeping national-security rationale. The ban followed organised cheating rackets that were using Telegram to defraud candidates ahead of the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination on June 21, with the National Testing Agency formally recommending action and MeitY invoking Section 69A. Two orders followed - a temporary restriction on access to Telegram until June 22, and a separate direction to disable the app's message-editing feature for already-posted messages until June 30.
Government filings before the Delhi High Court showed the action came only after extensive prior engagement, officials said they had pursued corrective measures with Telegram at least 35 times since October 2024, and that a Ministry of Home Affairs report described the platform as having effectively become a hub linking cybercrime actors, citing complaint figures that rose from 75,688 cases involving Rs 1,359 crore in 2023 to 2,75,840 cases involving Rs 3,086 crore in 2025 on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal.
Telegram challenged the order in court, arguing that Section 69A is designed to target specific pieces of information or particular URLs, not to "decapitate" an entire platform — pointing out it had already taken down over 900 of the 1,300 URLs MeitY had flagged. The Delhi High Court dismissed the challenge on June 19, with the judge relying on Section 2(1)(v) of the IT Act, which defines "information" broadly enough to include software and code, to conclude that an entire app could legally be treated as a blockable unit of information. The court weighed the order against the proportionality standard set in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India and concluded that protecting an estimated 2.2 million medical aspirants justified what it called a strictly time-bound, least-restrictive measure.
Digital rights groups disagreed. The Internet Freedom Foundation argued that Section 69A and the 2009 Blocking Rules allow the government to block specific information on a platform, not switch off an entire intermediary service, and certainly not to direct a company to redesign its product by disabling a feature nationwide. It specifically noted that the order disabling Telegram's edit feature cited no clear legal source of authority at all.
Whether Telegram's case sets a precedent or remains an exam-season exception will likely depend on what the government does the next time a platform becomes inconvenient.
