Ravi 🌑

Based on what I’m reading about the judgment of the Delhi High Court in the Telegram case, I’m just putting this on record that I completely disagree, on principle, with the Delhi High Court’s decision to uphold the Indian governments ban on Telegram in the country by dismissing Telegram’s petition. As a citizen, I expect better from our courts, in terms of upholding our right to free speech. I felt the same way about how X's pushback against censorship via the Sahyog portal was dealt with. This ban on Telegram is disproportionate for multiple reasons: 1. Blocking a platform on the basis of an apprehension of fraud based on a feature that can be/has been fixed is frankly ridiculous. The Indian government did not prove that it exhausted all possible avenues to prevent the fraud. Pre-censorship is an extreme step. I’d like to remind everyone that a decade or so ago we mocked Kapil Sibal for demanding precensorship of Facebook. Now I see tweets justifying precensorship of Telegram. How have we come to accept such extreme forms of censorship? The word “information” may be broad in terms of how the law is written, but shouldn’t it be the role of a court to restrict the misuse of broad phrases and the power that the government gives itself? 2. Blocking of a platform is different from blocking of a group is different from blocking of an account, is different from blocking of a post. They're not mere "information". The blocking ends up restricting legitimate speech not just for an individual user but Telegram’s entire set of over 100 million users, including me. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m on groups on Telegram with thousands of business owners, where business transactions take place: this impacts businesses, income and employment. We’re a country struggling to employ people because of whimsical and ignorant acts by a comfortable privileged and rent-seeking bureaucracy that has lost touch with the struggles of common people, and sees its role as one of herding sheep rather than enabling growth. 3. This sets a problematic precedence where the government of India will, on a whim, threaten to block entire platforms because they don’t accede to their extreme-censorship demands. Courts should strike down such acts from the government, because after this verdict, the sword of being shut down will hang on every platform. Expect MEITY and the Home Ministry which runs MEITY to now use this verdict as leverage against platforms to compromise our fundamental rights even further. This strengthens the infrastructure for censorship in the country, and I expect this will have a bearing on the IT rules that will follow. This, in my opinion, is a sad day for our democracy and justice in the country. John Russel in his newsletter that is read across South East Asia correctly called this ban shooting the messenger. For investors looking at India, and for those with money in the Indian economy, this is once again a negative signal. We need a stable economic environment for investment to flow in, and for employment to be generated. Meanwhile, Indian corporates are holding back on capital investment because of the same regulatory uncertainty. It feels like 2013 again.