Telegram has challenged India's block on the app in Delhi High Court, filed on June 17, arguing the government's move is unconstitutional. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ordered the restriction ahead of NEET 2026, India's medical entrance examination, citing evidence that fraudsters were using the platform to distribute leaked exam questions and coordinate cheating schemes.

NEET is effectively the only path into undergraduate medical and dental programs in India — it handles hundreds of thousands of applicants annually. A major cheating scandal in 2024 forced exam cancellations and drew parliamentary scrutiny, leaving the government determined to prevent a repeat. The timing of this block suggests that anxiety was the primary driver.

The government's legal power to do this comes from Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, a clause that lets officials order intermediaries (apps, websites, ISPs) to block content or services in the name of public order, national security, or similar broad interests. Notably, the government can issue these orders without warning the company involved and without making them public — the legal bar is simply that officials decide it's necessary. This tool has been used before: against TikTok and Chinese apps in 2020, against Twitter during farmer protest disputes. It is, in short, a blunt instrument.

Telegram's case hinges on proportionality. The platform argues, with CEO Pavel Durov publicly calling the move a "mistake," that blocking the entire app punishes tens of millions of ordinary users for fraud happening on the platform. That argument carries legal weight in India: since the Supreme Court's 2020 Anuradha Bhasin ruling on Kashmir internet shutdowns, Indian courts have required that restrictions on communication meet tests of genuine necessity and use the least intrusive method available.

The deeper technical and policy tension is this: Telegram offers both private, encrypted chats and large, semi-public group channels. That design makes it hard for the government to ask the company to remove specific pieces of content or shut particular channels without massive overhead — so governments frustrated by that difficulty have sometimes reached instead for a full block. Brazil suspended Telegram in 2025 over a similar compliance standoff. France arrested Durov in 2024 over the platform's moderation practices. India's approach follows a recognisable pattern of countries testing how far they can push the idea that a platform itself bears responsibility for what users do on it.

What happens next turns on whether the Delhi High Court grants relief before the exam date. If the court halts the block, the government will need to show, in open court, exactly what evidence connects Telegram — not WhatsApp groups or dark web forums — to the fraud schemes it was trying to stop. That's the whole point of the litigation: Section 69A exists partly because governments want to avoid having to make that case publicly. If the block stands, the precedent shifts: exam windows become occasions when app suspensions are normal.

The stakes are asymmetrical. For Telegram, India is the largest market. A block that repeats each exam season, normalised by a court ruling, would measurably harm user engagement and revenue. For the government, tolerating a high-profile cheating scandal in the post-2024 NEET environment carries political risk that briefly inconveniencing app users does not. Both sides have strong incentives to play for the outcome they need.

The core question — whether a government can suspend a global communications platform for a defined period without ordering the removal of specific content — remains unresolved across jurisdictions. The Delhi High Court's decision will be studied carefully in Brussels, Brasília, and other capitals where regulators face the same tension between platform design and state authority over public order.