A blocking order built for an exam
On June 16, 2026, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) ordered providers to block Telegram nationwide under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. A parallel directive required Telegram to disable its message-edit feature in India until June 30. The trigger was concrete: organised cheating rackets were using Telegram to hawk fake "leaked papers" to candidates ahead of the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination on June 21, and the National Testing Agency told the government the edit feature was being used to fabricate proof of leaks. The restriction was time-boxed to lift on June 22.
The case for the order is not frivolous, and it deserves to be stated plainly. NEET is the single gateway to medical education for roughly two million aspirants; a paper leak is not abstract harm but a corruption of a high-stakes public exam. When a platform is being used in real time to defraud students and the window of risk is a few days, a narrow, temporary block is a defensible emergency tool — which is essentially what the Delhi High Court found.
The court said proportionate; the market said otherwise
On June 19, Justice Tejas Karia upheld the block, holding it was the "least restrictive alternative in the circumstances," neither excessive nor disproportionate, with Section 69A's procedural safeguards properly followed. That tracks the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, which upheld Section 69A precisely because it is "a narrowly drawn provision with adequate safeguards" — written, reasoned orders subject to a review committee and judicial challenge.
But a block that is lawful can still be ineffective, and this one was. Within 48 hours, Indians simply routed around it. Per TechCrunch, Proton VPN reported daily signups from India up 120% above baseline on Wednesday, after a 150% spike in hourly registrations the previous evening; its iOS downloads rose 113% and it climbed from 18th to 5th in Apple's Utilities chart between June 16 and 18. Windscribe saw signups roughly double. Overall VPN downloads jumped from a ~139,000 daily average to 208,000. A ban meant to deny access to one app produced a measurable, lasting expansion in the number of Indians using encrypted tunnels the government cannot inspect at all.
That is the structural problem with blocking anonymising and encrypted tools. Justice Karia reportedly pressed whether the "rights of 150 million" Telegram users should be curtailed by a blanket ban — and the asymmetry is the answer. The cheating networks are mobile and will migrate to the next channel, while the cost falls on the general user base, who respond by adopting harder-to-block infrastructure.
Withholding the messenger
The episode then took a turn that should concern anyone regardless of their view on the block. On June 18, Proton VPN's General Manager, David Peterson, posted the signup figures. Within days his X account was withheld in India "in response to a legal demand," displaying the standard country-withholding notice. The timeline is contested: SFLC.in and technologist Pranesh Prakash noted the account had been logged on a blocked list as far back as May 31, leaving it unclear whether it was withheld throughout or re-withheld after the post. Either way, the effect is the same — a foreign executive reporting a true, newsworthy statistic about his own product became inaccessible to Indian users.
Blocking a live fraud channel is content moderation. Withholding the account of someone who publicly noted a surge in privacy-tool adoption is something else: it suppresses speech about the state's own conduct. Section 69A was upheld in Shreya Singhal on the understanding that it targets narrowly defined harms with reasons on the record. Using the same machinery against a commentator stretches the provision well past the rationale that made it constitutional, and it converts a defensible exam-security measure into a story about who is allowed to describe what the government did.
A proportionate path exists
None of this requires tolerating exam fraud. The proportionate tools were available and largely used: a short, dated, reviewable block aimed at a specific crisis, paired with takedown demands to Telegram for the offending channels. What turns a reasonable order into a cautionary tale is the reflex to widen it — disabling a product feature for the entire country, and reaching for account withholding against the people narrating the fallout.
The lesson policymakers should draw from the VPN numbers is not merely that the block leaked, but why. Every blanket restriction on an accessible app trains ordinary users to install tools that defeat all future blocks, shrinking the state's visibility over exactly the criminal activity it set out to stop. Encryption and anonymity are not the adversary here; they are the predictable destination of a population that has learned blocks are coming. The durable answer to exam-fraud rackets is investigation, prosecution, and exam-integrity reform — not a widening perimeter of blocking orders that the market routes around in two days and that, this time, swept up the messenger.