Frontline Magazine: National: Thursday, 16 April 2026.
Draft IT Rules shift online speech control toward Ministries, allowing direct takedown orders to users and making platform advisories binding. Compliance pressure pushes platforms toward pre-emptive removal of political and critical content.
On March 30, 2026, the
Union government proposed amendments to the IT Rules, 2021, that would give it
sweeping new powers over online speech. For the first time, the Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting could issue takedown notices directly to individual
users, while the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has tied
safe‑harbour protections for platforms to strict compliance with its advisories.
In the latest edition of Frontline webinar, Associate Editor Jinoy Jose P. speaks with cybersecurity researcher Srinivas Kodali, journalist and founder of MediaNama Nikhil Pahwa, and Sanjay Kapoor, President of Editors Guild of India. Together, they discuss what these draft rules mean for free speech, press freedom, and the future of India’s digital space.
Edited excerpts:
Jinoy Jose P.: Nikhil, the government says these rules are “clarificatory and procedural”. What do they actually change?
Nikhil Pahwa: There is nothing clarificatory about them. They expand the scope and powers of the Ministry substantially. Over the last two months, the amount of censorship on social media has expanded manyfold—more and more speech is being taken down because platforms are afraid of being held liable if the government goes after them.
You’ll remember that in 2021, Delhi Police landed at Twitter’s office because Twitter had refused to take down speech during the CAA/NRC protests. The government threatened that it would lose its safe harbour protection. In February 2021, the government changed the rules to expand the scope to include digital news publishers, streaming services, and even news aggregators like Google News and InShorts. It became a mechanism for censorship, even though the law doesn’t allow it.
These rules expand that further. They transfer the power of online censorship for news-related speech, so if anyone is even commenting on news, not reporting but commenting, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) can send a notice to the platform to take it down. Right now, all those orders come from the Ministry of IT, and MIB has to route through them. Now they want to remove that friction. We will see an expansion of censorship of speech, especially as we get closer to elections, criticism, parody of the Prime Minister, and comedians having their content removed. The scale and scope is increasing without any checks and balances.
Second: the rules that are being changed are ordinarily supposed to be placed before Parliament for ratification and scrutiny. What they’re changing now is that the ability to expand the scope of rules will happen through circulars and advisories, which previously never had legal power. A government can just issue an advisory without any checks, and platforms will have to comply.
Third: there is something called the Interdepartmental Committee of the Government of India that will now be allowed to take a call on what they want to allow or remove online, on their own, without needing a complaint. This is basically what the government had previously attempted with the Fact Check Unit. The Bombay High Court in 2024 struck it down as unconstitutional. What’s happened is that these new rules allow them to resurrect it as an IDC [International Data Corporation], bypass the Bombay High Court ruling, and grant the government greater censorship powers in the guise of addressing misinformation.
They gave a 15-day consultation for this. These are supposed to be public consultations—under the government’s pre-legislative consultation policy, submissions are to be held in the public domain so journalists can report on them. But for the last few years, the Ministry of IT has not been releasing these submissions and has been refusing them under RTI. In the last amendment, there was a consultation in November–December last year, notified in February this year. Aditi Agrawal of Tech Trace reported that Secretary S. Krishnan told platforms the 10-day implementation deadline was fine because they should have started implementing when the draft itself was done. Which means the outcome was already predetermined and the consultation is just for show. It’s a farce.
There have now been seven amendments to the IT rules since 2021. Courts have only been able to strike things down once—the Fact Check Unit—and that has also been resurrected. The speed at which the government is amending rules is much faster than we can get recourse from courts to protect free speech. This is bypassing the democratic process to build an infrastructure of censorship constructed over the last seven to ten years. Today, there was a news report that the next plan is to include X’s Community Notes under government regulation. Six months from now, there’ll be another plan. Bit by bit, like the boiling frog, they will keep expanding this digital public infrastructure for censorship.
Jinoy Jose P.: The Editors Guild issued its statement within five days of the draft being published. What specifically alarmed you?
Sanjay Kapoor: A lot of our history is being forgotten. The media played a very big role in raising the banner of revolt against British rule. India was a beacon of hope for many democracies. So when a democracy is getting undermined, there’s cause for major worry—and that worry gets aggravated when the legislative process is being bypassed.
You have platforms being taken down—4 PM, which has a huge subscriber base. The Wire had similar problems. A gentleman who mocked the Prime Minister over his diplomacy has come to grief. Yesterday, I was trying to figure out where we were inspired when drafting these laws, and only two countries showed up: China and Russia. Do we really want to be like them—totally illiberal and unmindful of our democratic rights?
Investigative journalism is getting impacted. There is a power of takedown that has been granted to petty officers across the country. Not just Delhi and Chennai—in large parts of India, people practising in the media are coming to grief because someone lesser than the district magistrate suddenly feels a report should be taken down. The chilling effect is being felt everywhere.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas, these rules bring ordinary social media users under the oversight of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry—not just registered news publishers, but people posting about current events. Secretary Krishnan admitted there is no line between a post and content. You’ve tracked surveillance and policing. What happens in practice when the state has a vague rule and a very fast trigger finger?
Srinivas Kodali: There’s this famous saying in India—there’s no problem with free speech, there’s a problem after free speech. After you post something, that’s when the cops come knocking. Two satire accounts critical of the current establishment recently had their accounts shut down permanently. Twitter shut them down for good. YouTube channels of independent news outfits are going down. When they approach the High Court, the state is saying: ‘You were anonymous, and that’s not acceptable. If you want to be critical of the state, whether through satire or any other medium, you have to disclose your identity.’ This goes against the very idea of the right to privacy.
Within the rules, there are specific clauses requiring intermediaries—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—to disclose who a user is when the Ministry demands it. Recently, the Delhi Police has been demanding that these agencies disclose large amounts of user information as part of investigations. So this isn’t just censorship. It’s also policing. It’s what happens post-censorship.
And when they say anybody can issue censorship orders now—not just the Ministry of IT, but MIB, anybody, the Interdepartmental Committee—by decentralising this, you allow pretty much any constable anywhere in India. The Mamnoor Nagar Police in Telangana recently issued Twitter a notice asking for a tweet to be censored just because someone posted something the local establishment didn’t like.
But we also need to understand: these are emergency rules. You have to shut the content down within three hours. Emergency rules are for emergencies. The question is—are we under an emergency? If we’re not, why do we need them? And even if we were, that’s when you’re told fundamental rights are suspended. If it’s not an emergency scenario, why are the people being censored not receiving notices or being heard? That goes against the very idea of natural justice.
This goes to the very idea of shutting speech for good. During the right to privacy hearings, the debate around encryption—WhatsApp, Signal—was about not wanting the state to know private communications. But in broadcast mediums, the state is now saying that anyone broadcasting essentially becomes a publisher. You can’t do that. And if the state does want to bring these mechanisms, they need to be debated in Parliament. They can’t be brought in the form of rules. It’s very excessive.
Jinoy Jose P.: Nikhil,
under the proposed Rule 3(4), any written instruction from the Ministry—an
advisory, guideline, even an SOP—becomes binding on platforms. If they don’t
comply, they lose their legal shield. The rational response for any platform is
to take down first and ask questions never. There’s also an assumption that big
tech should be held responsible for what’s posted on them. Could these rules
end up favoring big tech?
Nikhil Pahwa: Big tech companies are also badgered into submission. There are two types of relevant law here. One is Section 69A—secret blocking orders not available for scrutiny. In the landmark Shreya Singhal case in 2015, Justice Nariman wrote that if a user whose speech is taken down is identified, they will be given a hearing. That has never been followed. We don’t even know if scrutiny by the review committee takes place anymore.
Platforms used to push back. In 2021, when police landed at Twitter’s doorstep, Twitter had pushed back, saying orders—including the censoring of publishers like The Caravan—were unconstitutional. Since then, the government has constantly been at platforms in meetings. IPS [Indian Police Service] officers are part of the review committee, and they will lean towards censorship. That check and balance is no longer a check and balance.
The timeline for platforms to act on an order has gone from 14 days to 36 hours, and there was a report from the Indian Express that a Ministry official said they plan to bring it down to one hour. In a Bangalore High Court filing, X submitted that over a six-month period, they received 29,000 orders—an average of 160 per day. If you give a three-hour timeline to implement 160 orders, who has the legal capacity to examine each one?
This is happening because of scale—through the Sahyog portal, which X is challenging, it’s almost a hotline between platforms and multiple government departments: seven Central agencies, 33 State governments and government bodies reaching 70 platforms for censorship. Many orders don’t even come through that portal—they come from constables, as Srinivas said.
So platforms have no capacity to deal with it. They censor to protect themselves. Platforms are not being empowered—they are being used to censor us. Protecting the platforms that carry our speech is an integral part of protecting our speech. Yes, they need to be held to account for the censorship they do of our speech on their own. But here, the might of the state is on the platform to censor our speech without any accountability or transparency. If you file an RTI for a copy of a Section 79A order—which is supposed to be available under RTI—the government refuses to give it.
This entire system has been built to expand censorship and evade accountability. In software, we say: move fast and break things. This is moving fast and breaking speech.
Jinoy Jose P.: Is there room for meaningful revision, or is the basic design beyond repair?
Sanjay Kapoor: An infrastructure of censorship has been created. To stop it, you need safeguards—a review committee loaded not only with IPS and administrative service officers but also with journalists, editors, and others who question. Everything has to go through a process. But I think the desire in the government right now is not a calibrated response. They want to put the fear, put the scare, have a chilling impact—that people should be mindful of what they post, and it should not be against the government. We saw something posted about the head of state’s diplomacy that was taken down despite great viewership, and subsequently, another gentleman with 36 million Instagram followers posted it anyway.
The government thinks it can control the entire mindset of people, control free speech, but it’s not really working. They get away with it because there is no political party cognizant enough to challenge their authority. Our belief is that review committees need to be strengthened, safeguards need to be strengthened—ones mindful of our past, mindful of the fact that we are a democracy and not an illiberal state like China or Russia.
Jinoy Jose P.: A viewer says such restrictive laws get passed primarily because the news media in all its forms have become lamentably pliable over the past decade. How do you respond?
Sanjay Kapoor: I agree with what he’s saying. Everything is not being questioned adequately. In a real democracy, people challenge on the ground, in the courts, in Parliament. In India, there is a reconciliation that has happened—that the government will have its way regardless. Despite Amartya Sen writing The Argumentative Indian, the fact is, we don’t argue enough. We’re not even asking questions, and that is cause for major worry.
Jinoy Jose P.: Nikhil, if a viewer watching this wants to act—not just feel informed—what is the single most useful thing they can do?
Nikhil Pahwa: Before I address that, to say that the media is pliant or not pushing back is not correct. Newspapers might be, TV channels might be, but the web is vibrant with pushback, and it has been for over a decade. I ran the net neutrality campaign along with many others—Srinivas was there too. Citizens pushed back. We have the fundamental right to privacy. People have gone to court. The government right now is so powerful that it is making so many changes so quickly that it’s impossible to keep pace. And even when there’s pushback, everyone moves to the shiny new thing.
This is why, as Apar Gupta and I wrote, we need to focus on the infrastructure that has come up—and we need courts to take action on it.
Practically, the Internet Freedom Foundation is running a campaign where you can send comments to the ministry — they’ve drafted helpful guidance. But also, talk to your local MP, your MLA, your State government, and your Central government. Even within the party in power, MPs will be empowered to raise this when their constituents tell them something. Pick up the phone and call them.
Our role doesn’t stop at voting. We have social media to raise our voices. I got a censorship notice just yesterday to try and prevent me from reporting on a data breach—and people have the right to know about it. I’m now having to go to lawyers. Running a media company is not easy. We are trying our best, but everyone needs to step up. Please go to internetfreedom.in and participate in this democratic process—push back not just against these rules but against the infrastructure that has come up.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas,
the Sahyog portal was launched in 2024. It allows more than 30 State police
units and around eight Central agencies to send takedown orders directly to
platforms, often without the procedural safeguards the Supreme Court insisted
on in the Shreya Singhal judgment. With these draft rules on top, are we
looking at a single joined-up censorship infrastructure?
Srinivas Kodali: Sahyog Portal is the newest entity in the setup. If you look at digital infrastructures in policing in India, they largely pop up after the Mumbai attacks—NATGRID [National Intelligence Grid], the National Population Register, identity, censorship, and policing, all integrated. When you ask the people building them, they keep saying: This is about empowerment. But if you’re building systems to empower police, you’re going to get more policing. In Telangana, our police used to say one CCTV was equivalent to 100 police officials. We said: ‘That means we’re getting excessive policing.’
When you bring a portal like Sahyog and connect 30 policing agencies, someone posting something critical about Assam from Hyderabad could get a censorship notice not only from Assam Police but from Hyderabad Police as well. You’ve networked all these agencies together. Usually, to arrest someone in a different State, you need to go to court and get a transit permit. You don’t need any of that for digital censorship now.
What you’re witnessing is coordinated censorship—a network coordination across policing departments and Ministries. The Minister for Electronics and IT is also the Minister for Information and Broadcasting. When the Minister is the same for both Ministries, they coordinate better, and they coordinate better to censor us. There are no limits on these portals. We really need to talk about purpose limitations. What is the purpose of these entities, and why are you continuously increasing their scope? When Aadhaar was brought in, they said it was about welfare, and they continuously expanded its scope. We saw that function creep. We are witnessing it again.
When Nikhil refers to this as DPI for censorship, it’s actually control infrastructure—systems to control population, control their minds, empower police to do more censorship.
Jinoy Jose P.: Our legal columnist V. Venkatesan used the term “collateral censorship”—the idea that when the government sends a notice to a platform that is liable for user content, platforms tend to over-remove content, creating a system of broader suppression. Is there enough awareness in the media community about what is happening? Are we doing enough?
Sanjay Kapoor: That’s exactly my fear. The matter is being taken to a core group and discussed there. There’s no great awareness in the media beyond a certain point—the feeling is that this is in the domain of lawyers and they should discuss it. Recently, EGI organised a seminar where Apar Gupta and others came, and we discussed the challenges to media. I don’t know what impact it had, but I’m cognizant of the gap and we’re trying to correct it.
People are afraid. The courts, the media, the intermediaries—all are mortally afraid of the consequences. So even if the content is not really problematic, they remove it fearing adverse impact, fearing challenge by the state. Nobody is willing to take them on. The courts themselves are unclear about how far they can go. The people backing the censorship are prospering in this environment.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas, the government’s argument is that some blanket rules are needed to curb misinformation and deepfakes. Are there any global best practices or models we can emulate?
Srinivas Kodali: We’re having an information overload. It’s not that there’s a lack of information—there’s a lack of required information. Very few people understand the depth of what’s happening. And now the state is saying: I’m going to censor that kind of information. Keep people a little dumb. The state does not want to give you information that makes you an active citizen, that makes you question the state.
Usually, this is the role of courts and media—different pillars of democracy to keep the state in check. The state has realised this and is actively suppressing the powers of all these other entities. Digital infrastructures are not just coming in to control media, they’re coming in to control court systems too.
When you talk of resistance, it usually goes underground. I don’t mean a militia—I mean information going underground. Think of what happened during the Emergency, when news still existed but through different channels, word to word, offline. If digital media is being censored, can we start printing? The state can’t stop me from buying a printer. We need to start innovating, finding spaces where we can produce speech the state can’t see.
The state is trying to control platforms it can see and thinks are important. There are offline spaces—universities, social spaces. We need to do a lot more offline. We need to coordinate, the way the police coordinate, but strategically, about protecting rights.
Over the last few decades, civil rights movements have decreased. Digital rights movements are young—digital became big with smartphones post-2010, 2012. But over those years, we did fight back. We got the right to privacy, net neutrality, and we fought against 66A. It’s about organising. Go to internetfreedom.in. They are fighting back. It’s as simple as that.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas, two more things: the impact on language media, since most social media activity in India happens in Tamil, Malayalam, Bangla, Hindi, and those users are facing a centralised system largely comprising English-speaking or Hindi-speaking administrators. And someone has argued that privacy is a 20th-century idea—that in this era, you can’t really ask for privacy. How do these two angles connect to this issue?
Srinivas Kodali: On language and AI: as we start codifying Indian languages—whether allowing people to type in them or speak them so information becomes accessible to everyone—I’m afraid that as big tech entities make language models for our languages, it may lead to more censorship. We may stop remembering. Memory is something people keep talking about with AI. When we don’t talk about these issues, we forget them.
In some southern Indian States, there’s a certain kind of memory—when it comes to the freedom movement, their histories, their cultures—which the north has completely forgotten. That’s because of what kind of information is discussed and what kind is suppressed. Language plays a role, especially when you say you want to impose Hindi on the South.
On privacy and speech: what’s happening here is we’re codifying rights with digitisation. Think of an alphabet on your screen as an image of an alphabet—its symbols, codification. My own face right now is an image. Law is also codification. How you codify these mathematical models, how you codify the physical world online, determines what rights you have online. If you are digitising and ensuring people’s rights are protected while you digitise, you will have rights. It’s about how you design these systems.
The state is saying: I have the monopoly on everything when it comes to digital, and I decide how digitisation happens. Or the monopoly of the market, and the state is saying the market has no monopoly, I determine everything. That’s where the challenges are coming.
Yes, privacy has become hard to have in the digital age, just like clean air or clean water in an industrial society. But these are issues we need to fight for: better livelihoods, for a better social life, for a better human life. These fights will continue.
Jinoy Jose P.: Sanjay, final thoughts?
Sanjay Kapoor: These intermediaries are US-based. There are foreign policy implications in whatever is being done. X is owned by Elon Musk, Facebook by Zuckerberg—both close to Trump. If you’re trying to put a screw on them, there will be foreign policy implications. If India comes closer to the US, maybe the restrictions will ease, but that remains to be tested.
Jinoy Jose P.: Thank you, Srinivas Kodali, Sanjay Kapoor, and Nikhil Pahwa.
What we’ve heard today tells us something larger than a set of draft rules. As Nikhil said, this is the construction, piece by piece, of an infrastructure in which the government can control what citizens see, share, and say online—done not through a single ordinance or act, but through an accumulation of vague clauses, compressed timelines, and compliance obligations.
The word the IT Secretary used was “clarificatory”. The word the Bombay High Court used for the last version of these rules was “unconstitutional”. Somewhere between those two adjectives, the future of online speech in India will be decided.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity
Draft IT Rules shift online speech control toward Ministries, allowing direct takedown orders to users and making platform advisories binding. Compliance pressure pushes platforms toward pre-emptive removal of political and critical content.
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| New draft IT Rules give Ministries wider control over online content, linking safe harbour protections to compliance and faster takedown mandates in India. | Video Credit: Moderated by Jinoy Jose P.; Produced by Kavya Pradeep M. & Saatvika Radhakrishna |
In the latest edition of Frontline webinar, Associate Editor Jinoy Jose P. speaks with cybersecurity researcher Srinivas Kodali, journalist and founder of MediaNama Nikhil Pahwa, and Sanjay Kapoor, President of Editors Guild of India. Together, they discuss what these draft rules mean for free speech, press freedom, and the future of India’s digital space.
Edited excerpts:
Jinoy Jose P.: Nikhil, the government says these rules are “clarificatory and procedural”. What do they actually change?
Nikhil Pahwa: There is nothing clarificatory about them. They expand the scope and powers of the Ministry substantially. Over the last two months, the amount of censorship on social media has expanded manyfold—more and more speech is being taken down because platforms are afraid of being held liable if the government goes after them.
You’ll remember that in 2021, Delhi Police landed at Twitter’s office because Twitter had refused to take down speech during the CAA/NRC protests. The government threatened that it would lose its safe harbour protection. In February 2021, the government changed the rules to expand the scope to include digital news publishers, streaming services, and even news aggregators like Google News and InShorts. It became a mechanism for censorship, even though the law doesn’t allow it.
These rules expand that further. They transfer the power of online censorship for news-related speech, so if anyone is even commenting on news, not reporting but commenting, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) can send a notice to the platform to take it down. Right now, all those orders come from the Ministry of IT, and MIB has to route through them. Now they want to remove that friction. We will see an expansion of censorship of speech, especially as we get closer to elections, criticism, parody of the Prime Minister, and comedians having their content removed. The scale and scope is increasing without any checks and balances.
Second: the rules that are being changed are ordinarily supposed to be placed before Parliament for ratification and scrutiny. What they’re changing now is that the ability to expand the scope of rules will happen through circulars and advisories, which previously never had legal power. A government can just issue an advisory without any checks, and platforms will have to comply.
Third: there is something called the Interdepartmental Committee of the Government of India that will now be allowed to take a call on what they want to allow or remove online, on their own, without needing a complaint. This is basically what the government had previously attempted with the Fact Check Unit. The Bombay High Court in 2024 struck it down as unconstitutional. What’s happened is that these new rules allow them to resurrect it as an IDC [International Data Corporation], bypass the Bombay High Court ruling, and grant the government greater censorship powers in the guise of addressing misinformation.
They gave a 15-day consultation for this. These are supposed to be public consultations—under the government’s pre-legislative consultation policy, submissions are to be held in the public domain so journalists can report on them. But for the last few years, the Ministry of IT has not been releasing these submissions and has been refusing them under RTI. In the last amendment, there was a consultation in November–December last year, notified in February this year. Aditi Agrawal of Tech Trace reported that Secretary S. Krishnan told platforms the 10-day implementation deadline was fine because they should have started implementing when the draft itself was done. Which means the outcome was already predetermined and the consultation is just for show. It’s a farce.
There have now been seven amendments to the IT rules since 2021. Courts have only been able to strike things down once—the Fact Check Unit—and that has also been resurrected. The speed at which the government is amending rules is much faster than we can get recourse from courts to protect free speech. This is bypassing the democratic process to build an infrastructure of censorship constructed over the last seven to ten years. Today, there was a news report that the next plan is to include X’s Community Notes under government regulation. Six months from now, there’ll be another plan. Bit by bit, like the boiling frog, they will keep expanding this digital public infrastructure for censorship.
Jinoy Jose P.: The Editors Guild issued its statement within five days of the draft being published. What specifically alarmed you?
Sanjay Kapoor: A lot of our history is being forgotten. The media played a very big role in raising the banner of revolt against British rule. India was a beacon of hope for many democracies. So when a democracy is getting undermined, there’s cause for major worry—and that worry gets aggravated when the legislative process is being bypassed.
You have platforms being taken down—4 PM, which has a huge subscriber base. The Wire had similar problems. A gentleman who mocked the Prime Minister over his diplomacy has come to grief. Yesterday, I was trying to figure out where we were inspired when drafting these laws, and only two countries showed up: China and Russia. Do we really want to be like them—totally illiberal and unmindful of our democratic rights?
Investigative journalism is getting impacted. There is a power of takedown that has been granted to petty officers across the country. Not just Delhi and Chennai—in large parts of India, people practising in the media are coming to grief because someone lesser than the district magistrate suddenly feels a report should be taken down. The chilling effect is being felt everywhere.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas, these rules bring ordinary social media users under the oversight of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry—not just registered news publishers, but people posting about current events. Secretary Krishnan admitted there is no line between a post and content. You’ve tracked surveillance and policing. What happens in practice when the state has a vague rule and a very fast trigger finger?
Srinivas Kodali: There’s this famous saying in India—there’s no problem with free speech, there’s a problem after free speech. After you post something, that’s when the cops come knocking. Two satire accounts critical of the current establishment recently had their accounts shut down permanently. Twitter shut them down for good. YouTube channels of independent news outfits are going down. When they approach the High Court, the state is saying: ‘You were anonymous, and that’s not acceptable. If you want to be critical of the state, whether through satire or any other medium, you have to disclose your identity.’ This goes against the very idea of the right to privacy.
Within the rules, there are specific clauses requiring intermediaries—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—to disclose who a user is when the Ministry demands it. Recently, the Delhi Police has been demanding that these agencies disclose large amounts of user information as part of investigations. So this isn’t just censorship. It’s also policing. It’s what happens post-censorship.
And when they say anybody can issue censorship orders now—not just the Ministry of IT, but MIB, anybody, the Interdepartmental Committee—by decentralising this, you allow pretty much any constable anywhere in India. The Mamnoor Nagar Police in Telangana recently issued Twitter a notice asking for a tweet to be censored just because someone posted something the local establishment didn’t like.
But we also need to understand: these are emergency rules. You have to shut the content down within three hours. Emergency rules are for emergencies. The question is—are we under an emergency? If we’re not, why do we need them? And even if we were, that’s when you’re told fundamental rights are suspended. If it’s not an emergency scenario, why are the people being censored not receiving notices or being heard? That goes against the very idea of natural justice.
This goes to the very idea of shutting speech for good. During the right to privacy hearings, the debate around encryption—WhatsApp, Signal—was about not wanting the state to know private communications. But in broadcast mediums, the state is now saying that anyone broadcasting essentially becomes a publisher. You can’t do that. And if the state does want to bring these mechanisms, they need to be debated in Parliament. They can’t be brought in the form of rules. It’s very excessive.
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| Apps for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other social networks on a smartphone in Chennai in March 2018. Short compliance windows and liability risk reshape newsroom and creator behaviour, narrowing space for dissent as elections approach. | Photo Credit: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images |
Nikhil Pahwa: Big tech companies are also badgered into submission. There are two types of relevant law here. One is Section 69A—secret blocking orders not available for scrutiny. In the landmark Shreya Singhal case in 2015, Justice Nariman wrote that if a user whose speech is taken down is identified, they will be given a hearing. That has never been followed. We don’t even know if scrutiny by the review committee takes place anymore.
Platforms used to push back. In 2021, when police landed at Twitter’s doorstep, Twitter had pushed back, saying orders—including the censoring of publishers like The Caravan—were unconstitutional. Since then, the government has constantly been at platforms in meetings. IPS [Indian Police Service] officers are part of the review committee, and they will lean towards censorship. That check and balance is no longer a check and balance.
The timeline for platforms to act on an order has gone from 14 days to 36 hours, and there was a report from the Indian Express that a Ministry official said they plan to bring it down to one hour. In a Bangalore High Court filing, X submitted that over a six-month period, they received 29,000 orders—an average of 160 per day. If you give a three-hour timeline to implement 160 orders, who has the legal capacity to examine each one?
This is happening because of scale—through the Sahyog portal, which X is challenging, it’s almost a hotline between platforms and multiple government departments: seven Central agencies, 33 State governments and government bodies reaching 70 platforms for censorship. Many orders don’t even come through that portal—they come from constables, as Srinivas said.
So platforms have no capacity to deal with it. They censor to protect themselves. Platforms are not being empowered—they are being used to censor us. Protecting the platforms that carry our speech is an integral part of protecting our speech. Yes, they need to be held to account for the censorship they do of our speech on their own. But here, the might of the state is on the platform to censor our speech without any accountability or transparency. If you file an RTI for a copy of a Section 79A order—which is supposed to be available under RTI—the government refuses to give it.
This entire system has been built to expand censorship and evade accountability. In software, we say: move fast and break things. This is moving fast and breaking speech.
Jinoy Jose P.: Is there room for meaningful revision, or is the basic design beyond repair?
Sanjay Kapoor: An infrastructure of censorship has been created. To stop it, you need safeguards—a review committee loaded not only with IPS and administrative service officers but also with journalists, editors, and others who question. Everything has to go through a process. But I think the desire in the government right now is not a calibrated response. They want to put the fear, put the scare, have a chilling impact—that people should be mindful of what they post, and it should not be against the government. We saw something posted about the head of state’s diplomacy that was taken down despite great viewership, and subsequently, another gentleman with 36 million Instagram followers posted it anyway.
The government thinks it can control the entire mindset of people, control free speech, but it’s not really working. They get away with it because there is no political party cognizant enough to challenge their authority. Our belief is that review committees need to be strengthened, safeguards need to be strengthened—ones mindful of our past, mindful of the fact that we are a democracy and not an illiberal state like China or Russia.
Jinoy Jose P.: A viewer says such restrictive laws get passed primarily because the news media in all its forms have become lamentably pliable over the past decade. How do you respond?
Sanjay Kapoor: I agree with what he’s saying. Everything is not being questioned adequately. In a real democracy, people challenge on the ground, in the courts, in Parliament. In India, there is a reconciliation that has happened—that the government will have its way regardless. Despite Amartya Sen writing The Argumentative Indian, the fact is, we don’t argue enough. We’re not even asking questions, and that is cause for major worry.
Jinoy Jose P.: Nikhil, if a viewer watching this wants to act—not just feel informed—what is the single most useful thing they can do?
Nikhil Pahwa: Before I address that, to say that the media is pliant or not pushing back is not correct. Newspapers might be, TV channels might be, but the web is vibrant with pushback, and it has been for over a decade. I ran the net neutrality campaign along with many others—Srinivas was there too. Citizens pushed back. We have the fundamental right to privacy. People have gone to court. The government right now is so powerful that it is making so many changes so quickly that it’s impossible to keep pace. And even when there’s pushback, everyone moves to the shiny new thing.
This is why, as Apar Gupta and I wrote, we need to focus on the infrastructure that has come up—and we need courts to take action on it.
Practically, the Internet Freedom Foundation is running a campaign where you can send comments to the ministry — they’ve drafted helpful guidance. But also, talk to your local MP, your MLA, your State government, and your Central government. Even within the party in power, MPs will be empowered to raise this when their constituents tell them something. Pick up the phone and call them.
Our role doesn’t stop at voting. We have social media to raise our voices. I got a censorship notice just yesterday to try and prevent me from reporting on a data breach—and people have the right to know about it. I’m now having to go to lawyers. Running a media company is not easy. We are trying our best, but everyone needs to step up. Please go to internetfreedom.in and participate in this democratic process—push back not just against these rules but against the infrastructure that has come up.
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| Protesters from the Anonymous India group of hackers wear Guy Fawkes masks as they protest against laws they say give the government control over censorship of internet usage in Mumbai. Rule changes lean on advisories and circulars rather than parliamentary scrutiny, reducing legislative visibility. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement |
Srinivas Kodali: Sahyog Portal is the newest entity in the setup. If you look at digital infrastructures in policing in India, they largely pop up after the Mumbai attacks—NATGRID [National Intelligence Grid], the National Population Register, identity, censorship, and policing, all integrated. When you ask the people building them, they keep saying: This is about empowerment. But if you’re building systems to empower police, you’re going to get more policing. In Telangana, our police used to say one CCTV was equivalent to 100 police officials. We said: ‘That means we’re getting excessive policing.’
When you bring a portal like Sahyog and connect 30 policing agencies, someone posting something critical about Assam from Hyderabad could get a censorship notice not only from Assam Police but from Hyderabad Police as well. You’ve networked all these agencies together. Usually, to arrest someone in a different State, you need to go to court and get a transit permit. You don’t need any of that for digital censorship now.
What you’re witnessing is coordinated censorship—a network coordination across policing departments and Ministries. The Minister for Electronics and IT is also the Minister for Information and Broadcasting. When the Minister is the same for both Ministries, they coordinate better, and they coordinate better to censor us. There are no limits on these portals. We really need to talk about purpose limitations. What is the purpose of these entities, and why are you continuously increasing their scope? When Aadhaar was brought in, they said it was about welfare, and they continuously expanded its scope. We saw that function creep. We are witnessing it again.
When Nikhil refers to this as DPI for censorship, it’s actually control infrastructure—systems to control population, control their minds, empower police to do more censorship.
Jinoy Jose P.: Our legal columnist V. Venkatesan used the term “collateral censorship”—the idea that when the government sends a notice to a platform that is liable for user content, platforms tend to over-remove content, creating a system of broader suppression. Is there enough awareness in the media community about what is happening? Are we doing enough?
Sanjay Kapoor: That’s exactly my fear. The matter is being taken to a core group and discussed there. There’s no great awareness in the media beyond a certain point—the feeling is that this is in the domain of lawyers and they should discuss it. Recently, EGI organised a seminar where Apar Gupta and others came, and we discussed the challenges to media. I don’t know what impact it had, but I’m cognizant of the gap and we’re trying to correct it.
People are afraid. The courts, the media, the intermediaries—all are mortally afraid of the consequences. So even if the content is not really problematic, they remove it fearing adverse impact, fearing challenge by the state. Nobody is willing to take them on. The courts themselves are unclear about how far they can go. The people backing the censorship are prospering in this environment.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas, the government’s argument is that some blanket rules are needed to curb misinformation and deepfakes. Are there any global best practices or models we can emulate?
Srinivas Kodali: We’re having an information overload. It’s not that there’s a lack of information—there’s a lack of required information. Very few people understand the depth of what’s happening. And now the state is saying: I’m going to censor that kind of information. Keep people a little dumb. The state does not want to give you information that makes you an active citizen, that makes you question the state.
Usually, this is the role of courts and media—different pillars of democracy to keep the state in check. The state has realised this and is actively suppressing the powers of all these other entities. Digital infrastructures are not just coming in to control media, they’re coming in to control court systems too.
When you talk of resistance, it usually goes underground. I don’t mean a militia—I mean information going underground. Think of what happened during the Emergency, when news still existed but through different channels, word to word, offline. If digital media is being censored, can we start printing? The state can’t stop me from buying a printer. We need to start innovating, finding spaces where we can produce speech the state can’t see.
The state is trying to control platforms it can see and thinks are important. There are offline spaces—universities, social spaces. We need to do a lot more offline. We need to coordinate, the way the police coordinate, but strategically, about protecting rights.
Over the last few decades, civil rights movements have decreased. Digital rights movements are young—digital became big with smartphones post-2010, 2012. But over those years, we did fight back. We got the right to privacy, net neutrality, and we fought against 66A. It’s about organising. Go to internetfreedom.in. They are fighting back. It’s as simple as that.
Jinoy Jose P.: Srinivas, two more things: the impact on language media, since most social media activity in India happens in Tamil, Malayalam, Bangla, Hindi, and those users are facing a centralised system largely comprising English-speaking or Hindi-speaking administrators. And someone has argued that privacy is a 20th-century idea—that in this era, you can’t really ask for privacy. How do these two angles connect to this issue?
Srinivas Kodali: On language and AI: as we start codifying Indian languages—whether allowing people to type in them or speak them so information becomes accessible to everyone—I’m afraid that as big tech entities make language models for our languages, it may lead to more censorship. We may stop remembering. Memory is something people keep talking about with AI. When we don’t talk about these issues, we forget them.
In some southern Indian States, there’s a certain kind of memory—when it comes to the freedom movement, their histories, their cultures—which the north has completely forgotten. That’s because of what kind of information is discussed and what kind is suppressed. Language plays a role, especially when you say you want to impose Hindi on the South.
On privacy and speech: what’s happening here is we’re codifying rights with digitisation. Think of an alphabet on your screen as an image of an alphabet—its symbols, codification. My own face right now is an image. Law is also codification. How you codify these mathematical models, how you codify the physical world online, determines what rights you have online. If you are digitising and ensuring people’s rights are protected while you digitise, you will have rights. It’s about how you design these systems.
The state is saying: I have the monopoly on everything when it comes to digital, and I decide how digitisation happens. Or the monopoly of the market, and the state is saying the market has no monopoly, I determine everything. That’s where the challenges are coming.
Yes, privacy has become hard to have in the digital age, just like clean air or clean water in an industrial society. But these are issues we need to fight for: better livelihoods, for a better social life, for a better human life. These fights will continue.
Jinoy Jose P.: Sanjay, final thoughts?
Sanjay Kapoor: These intermediaries are US-based. There are foreign policy implications in whatever is being done. X is owned by Elon Musk, Facebook by Zuckerberg—both close to Trump. If you’re trying to put a screw on them, there will be foreign policy implications. If India comes closer to the US, maybe the restrictions will ease, but that remains to be tested.
Jinoy Jose P.: Thank you, Srinivas Kodali, Sanjay Kapoor, and Nikhil Pahwa.
What we’ve heard today tells us something larger than a set of draft rules. As Nikhil said, this is the construction, piece by piece, of an infrastructure in which the government can control what citizens see, share, and say online—done not through a single ordinance or act, but through an accumulation of vague clauses, compressed timelines, and compliance obligations.
The word the IT Secretary used was “clarificatory”. The word the Bombay High Court used for the last version of these rules was “unconstitutional”. Somewhere between those two adjectives, the future of online speech in India will be decided.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity
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