A three-judge bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana stayed all four pending High Court challenges to the Union government's Sahyog portal on July 22, 2026, with notice on the Centre's transfer petitions returnable August 10. The frozen cases include X Corp's and DigiPub News India Foundation's writ appeals in the Karnataka High Court, and comedian Kunal Kamra's and Haresh Jagtiani's petitions in the Bombay High Court (ThePrint; Bar and Bench). The Centre's pitch for consolidation was procedural: four benches ruling on identical constitutional questions risk producing conflicting readings of a central statute. The Court has signalled it may now decide, in one sitting, whether Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act plus Rule 3(1)(d) of the 2021 Intermediary Guidelines can be used to order takedowns outside the safeguards Parliament built into Section 69A.
The Case for One Court Deciding
The government's consolidation argument is not frivolous. A platform operating nationally shouldn't face one takedown regime in Karnataka and a different one in Maharashtra. The Karnataka High Court's single judge, Justice M. Nagaprasanna, already dismissed X Corp's original petition on September 24, 2025, upholding Rule 3(1)(d) and the Sahyog portal as valid due-diligence machinery — a ruling X Corp is now appealing. If the Bombay High Court's division bench reached the opposite conclusion on Kunal Kamra's parallel challenge, intermediaries would be left navigating two irreconcilable legal regimes for the same statute. Letting the Supreme Court settle the constitutional question once, rather than after years of appeals from divergent High Court rulings, is a defensible use of Article 139A-style transfer power, and it is the kind of institutional tidiness Indian appellate courts have used before on nationally significant statutes.
What Is Actually Being Litigated
The substance is narrower than "censorship versus free speech" — it is a question of which statutory gate content removal must pass through. Section 69A lets the government block content, but only after an authorised officer records reasons in writing, a review committee examines the order, and — under the framework the Supreme Court blessed in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) — publishers in some circumstances get a hearing (Indian Kanoon). Section 79(3)(b) is a different animal: a safe-harbour conditioning clause that tells intermediaries they lose immunity from liability if they don't act on "actual knowledge" of unlawful content (PRS Legislative Research). X Corp's core argument — echoed by DigiPub, which says the process excludes publishers whose content is actually being pulled — is that the Home Ministry's Sahyog portal uses 79(3)(b) and Rule 3(1)(d) to run a blocking regime through the back door, without any of 69A's recorded-reasons, review-committee or hearing requirements. Kamra's Bombay High Court petition, filed against the 2025 amendment to Rule 3(1)(d), makes the identical claim: that Sahyog is a "parallel censorship regime."
The Portal Keeps Running While the Courts Wait
The detail that matters most in the SC's order is what it did not stay: Sahyog itself. The Court froze the litigation, not the government's takedown machinery, so the portal keeps operating on the same footing it has for two years while petitioners wait for a hearing date. The scale is not trivial. X Corp's own court filings show it was asked to remove roughly 1,400 posts or accounts between March 2024 and June 2025, with more than 70% of those orders routed through the Cybercrime Coordination Centre's Sahyog system rather than through 69A's blocking process (The Wire). Separately, X told the Karnataka High Court it complied with 26,641 of 29,118 government takedown requests between January and June 2025 — a 91% compliance rate (Bar and Bench). Whatever the merits of consolidation, every week the Supreme Court takes to schedule arguments is a week in which the disputed mechanism — not a settled one — keeps issuing orders.
Why the Distinction Is Not Academic
Proportionate regulation of harmful content is a legitimate goal, and India's government faces real pressure to move fast on things like non-consensual imagery, fraud and incitement. But speed is exactly why Parliament built 69A's safeguards in the first place: recorded reasons and review create an audit trail: they let a court, a journalist or the platform itself later check whether a takedown was proportionate to the harm claimed. A regime that achieves the same removal through a safe-harbour threat, with no recorded reasoning requirement and no independent review, doesn't just move faster — it removes the record that lets anyone check whether the speed was justified. That is the gap DigiPub is pointing at when it says publishers are cut out of a process that determines whether their own journalism stays online. The Supreme Court taking up the merits itself is not the problem; the problem is that doing so decides nothing about how Sahyog operates in the meantime. Until August 10 and whatever scheduling follows, the safe-harbour route stays open, and the safeguards Shreya Singhal tied to 69A are simply unavailable to the intermediaries and publishers not currently allowed to argue that they should apply.