Revisiting Public Order in Digital Governance: The Forgotten Constitutional Threshold

This Blog is Written by Mishika Singh, 4th Year, BA LLB, MIT-WPU School of Law, Pune & Gouri Shankar, 3rd Year, LLB, MIT-WPU School of Law, Pune.

                                                                                                                                       (Blog I, Edition VI)

Introduction

On June 16 2026, MeitY ordered Telegram Temporary blocked across India under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, citing widespread fraud tied to the NEET UG medical entrance examination. Telegram challenged the order; three days later, the Delhi High Court in Telegram FZ LLC v Union of India upheld the ban. Justice Karia applied the proportionality framework from Anuradha Bhasin assessing appropriateness, necessity and least restrictive means and concluded the blockade was lawful and proportionate.

Critiques So Far Right, but Incomplete

Commentators quickly attacked the decision. Some warned that treating an entire platform as “information” normalizes blanket takedowns. Others argued the government’s technical-architecture claims improperly shifted the burden in the proportionality exercise. Those criticisms rightly highlight problems in how proportionality was applied. But they stop one step short: the court never tested whether the harm government invoked actually met the constitutional meaning of “public order.” That omission matters more than the proportionality debate alone.

The Threshold that Matters but Overlooked

Indian constitutional jurisprudence provides a well-established framework proportionality Test for addressing this issue, one that emerged decades before the rise of the digital age. In Ram Manohar Lohia v. State of Bihar (1965), a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court drew a clear conceptual distinction between "law and order" and "public order." The Court explained that these expressions are not synonymous but represent concentric circles of progressively narrower scope. At the broadest level lies "law and order", within it is "public order", and at the innermost core is the security of the State. This formulation underscores that not every breach of law and order automatically amounts to a disturbance of public order. The Supreme Court further refined this distinction in Arun Ghosh v. State of West Bengal (1969). It held that the decisive inquiry is whether the conduct in question disrupts the ordinary rhythm and stability of community life or whether its impact remains confined to an individual or a specific, identifiable group without extending to society at large. Consequently, even conduct constituting a grave criminal offence may not satisfy the constitutional threshold for a disturbance of "public order" if its consequences do not transcend the immediate parties and affect the community as a whole. That distinction matters online because the same statutory vocabulary governs internet suspensions and blocking orders. MeitY’s rules, the Telegraph Act, the 2009 blocking rules and the Anuradha Bhasin test all use “public order” without redefining it for digital harms. If blocking a platform is to be treated as requiring a lower threshold than depriving liberty, that change must be argued; it cannot be assumed by simply invoking the term. In Telegram FZ neither the government nor the court undertook that argument.

What the Record Actually Shows

The investigative materials the government relied on identified channels with names such as “PAPER LEAKED NEET” and “Re-NEET 2026” soliciting money from candidates and families in exchange for leaked papers. That conduct is extortion and fraud targeted at a defined class examinees and their relatives through discrete channels. Under Lohia and Ghosh, that resembles a harm confined to a particular group rather than one that upends society’s general rhythm. Yet the judgment moved from “misuse of the platform” to “public order” without justifying why this particular form of cheating should carry the higher constitutional label. The court then focused on whether the Telegram blockade was proportionate to this unexamined premise.

A Policy Pattern that was Never Re-examined

State governments have repeatedly ordered internet suspensions during exams Gujarat (2016), Rajasthan (multiple times since 2018), Arunachal Pradesh (2018, 2020) and West Bengal (2022). Those orders commonly cited the need to “maintain law and order,” the broader standard recognized in Lohia. Rajasthan even told its High Court it would stop such suspensions, yet resumed them later. MeitY’s Telegram order breaks with that administrative pattern by recasting exam related threats as “public order” without explaining why the digital context elevates the harm.

How the Reasoning Spread Beyond the Case

Within weeks of the Telegram decision, MeitY issued a notice to Meta asking WhatsApp to delay its username feature rollout, and sent similar letters to Signal and Telegram, invoking the same technical-architecture worries used before the court: anonymity, rapid recreation of accounts, bot-driven amplification. Unlike Section 69A actions, these notices were not accompanied by "Rule7 Committee" processes or judicial oversight. The technical-architecture framing from the litigation thus migrated into a preemptive regulatory posture that lacks the procedural safeguards Section 69A requires.

A Deeper Factual Problem

Even on its own terms, the government’s causal story was weak. Shortly after NEET, Maharashtra traced a leaked teacher-eligibility paper to a private printing press; Rajasthan exposed cheating run through paid invigilators. Those failures did not depend on Telegram or any messaging app. Printing presses, corrupt officials and transport chains remain powerful non-digital avenues for leaks. Suspending one distribution channel therefore did little to address the upstream causes actually producing exam compromises.

What Needs Correcting

The real legal gap is not just proportionality analysis, but the failure to test whether exam fraud qualifies as a “public order” harm in the constitutional sense. In Telegram FZ the Rule 7 Committee, the parties, and the court treated public order as given. By doing so, they allowed a contested legal claim to gain de facto force without defending it on its own terms. That unexamined framing now informs regulatory actions taken with even less procedural discipline than Section 69A requires.

Conclusion

Examination fraud is a serious public problem. Whether it rises to the constitutional threshold of “public order” sufficient to justify platform wide blocking remains undecided. Courts should be asked to confront that antecedent question directly, because accepting it by fiat risks normalizing sweeping digital interventions without adequate legal or factual grounding.

(Write to the author at cshankar.legal23@gmail.com.)