A series of IT Rules amendments has shifted online speech control from courts to the executive, enabling fast, opaque takedowns with limited accountability.
In The Dark Knight Rises , Gotham is not conquered in a single dramatic stroke but softened with the cultivation of fear and the practice of control. This allows for the appropriation of exceptional powers as the public has been conditioned to feel perpetually unsafe and hence extraordinary power begins to look like ordinary administration.
This provides a useful frame for understanding the digital censorship architecture assembled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Since February 2021, four expansions of the IT Rules have centralised executive power over what Indians may say, see, and share online, each presented as a minor technical adjustment, and wrapped up in the language of citizen safety.
The most recent draft, circulated on March 30, 2026, widens the net from news platforms to ordinary social media users who comment on news and current affairs, a move that plainly responds to the rise of independent commentators channelling citizen anger at public officials across the ideological spectrum. It also proposes to make informal communication such as advisories, clarifications, codes of practice to be legally binding on platforms.
This not only exceeds the scope of the parent act but appears aimed at coercing platform compliance and redesign. For instance, if platforms are held liable for Community Notes and similar user-led fact-checking, they will remove the feature. While public pushback has been loud, the draft is only the newest layer in an ‘India Censorship Stack’ that already runs deep. The common principle of that stack is speed without scrutiny, prioritising pace of removal over due process. Hence, the user whose post, or even entire account, vanishes is rarely told why, or provided any real legal remedy to appeal.
Two provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000 sit at the heart of this architecture: Section 69A, which governs blocking, and Section 79, which grants platforms safe harbour for user-generated content. Both were upheld in Shreya Singhal v Union of India but only because the Court read in safeguards that MeitY now flagrantly disregards.
Section 69A blocking orders are issued in secrecy, in volume, at velocity. Users who write to MeitY are denied copies of the orders against them. They are summoned to Delhi for meetings without being told what they are alleged to have done wrong. Section 79, meanwhile, has been twisted even further.
Consider the four amendments to the IT Rules, 2021 under Section 79 in sequence. The October 2022 amendment created a Grievance Appellate Committee, which is an executive body sitting in appeal over platform speech decisions and rewrote Rule 3 to require intermediaries to “ensure compliance” with their own terms and make “reasonable efforts” to keep prohibited speech content off their services. Takedown grievance windows shrank to 72 hours.
On the surface, the change was procedural. In substance, it was structural. It converted platforms from passive hosts into active enforcers, and positioned the Union government as the ultimate arbiter of permissible speech. The shift was unmistakable and required platforms to remove more, remove faster, do so under the shadow of government review.
In effect, our speech is being censored by the government via platforms that are meant to carry it.
The April 2023 amendment went further. Tucked alongside online-gaming provisions that were widely welcomed by industry was the fact-checking power under Rule 3(1)(b)(v). It required intermediaries to make “reasonable efforts” not to host speech that, “in respect of any business of the Central Government,” was identified as fake, false or misleading by a fact-check unit designated by the Ministry itself.
Source: https://www.deccanherald.com/india/the-rise-of-infrastructure-for-digital-censorship-3964849
