Telegram filed a petition in the Delhi High Court on June 17, challenging India's temporary block on the app as unconstitutional, Al Jazeera reported. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had ordered the restriction in the days before the NEET 2026 medical entrance examination, citing evidence that fraudsters were using the platform to target students — distributing leaked questions or orchestrating paper-fraud schemes.

India's NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) is among the highest-stakes examinations in the country, serving as the sole gateway to undergraduate medical and dental admissions. Allegations of organised cheating have dogged it for years; a scandal in 2024 forced mass cancellations and triggered parliamentary scrutiny, making the government acutely sensitive to any fresh hint of irregularity.

The IT ministry's authority here flows from Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, which permits the government to direct intermediaries to block access to content or services in the interest of, among other things, public order. The provision has previously been used against TikTok and dozens of Chinese apps in 2020, and against Twitter during farmer protest-related content disputes. Crucially, Section 69A orders are issued without prior notice to the affected party and are not automatically made public — the legal threshold is executive satisfaction rather than judicial authorisation.

Telegram's legal challenge directly contests that framework. Al Jazeera reported that the platform argues the blanket app-level block is disproportionate, and CEO Pavel Durov publicly characterised the measure as a "mistake" that punishes tens of millions of legitimate users for the actions of bad actors on the platform. The proportionality argument is legally significant: Indian courts have held, since the Supreme Court's Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020) ruling on Kashmir internet shutdowns, that restrictions on communication must satisfy tests of necessity and least-restrictive means.

The distinction between blocking a platform entirely and compelling it to take down specific content or channels is at the core of this dispute. Telegram's architecture — end-to-end encryption in secret chats, but also large, semi-public group channels — has long made granular compliance with government takedown requests technically and operationally contested. Governments frustrated by that friction have periodically reached for the blunter instrument of a full block. Brazil suspended the app in 2025 after a compliance standoff; France arrested Durov in 2024 over the platform's moderation practices. India's move fits a recognisable pattern of jurisdictions testing how far platform-level liability can be pushed.

Whether the Delhi High Court grants interim relief before NEET 2026's examination date will be the immediate pressure point. If the court stays the block, the government will likely need to articulate on the record the specific evidence linking Telegram — rather than, say, WhatsApp groups or dark-web forums — to the fraud it sought to prevent. That evidential burden, forced into the open by litigation, is precisely what Section 69A's opacity was designed to avoid. If the block is upheld, it establishes a clear precedent for exam-window app suspensions, a tool other state education boards may find tempting.

India is Telegram's largest market by user base. The stakes for the company are not merely reputational: a prolonged or periodically renewable exam-season block, normalised by a court ruling, would materially affect engagement and advertising revenue in a country where the platform has spent years building out its user base. For the government, the calculus runs the other way — tolerating a high-profile cheating incident in the post-2024 NEET environment carries political costs that temporarily inconveniencing app users does not.

The broader legal question — whether a sovereign government can suspend a global communications platform for a defined window without individuated content-level orders — sits unresolved across multiple jurisdictions. The Delhi High Court's ruling, when it comes, will be watched closely in Brussels, Brasília, and beyond.