In India, free speech is under siege not only from governments but increasingly from corporations that treat courts as convenient censorship bureaux. The recent saga of Adani Enterprises’ gag order is a stark warning of how fragile our safeguards really are.
On 6 September 2025, a Rohini district court in Delhi handed the conglomerate an ex parte injunction against nine journalists and organisations, and astonishingly, against unnamed “John Does.” The order restrained them from publishing anything “unverified” about the company and compelled takedowns of existing content.
Within days, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting swung into action, ordering the erasure of over 200 YouTube videos and Instagram posts by outlets and commentators ranging from Newslaundry and The Wire to Ravish Kumar and Dhruv Rathee.
The ministry’s notices were indiscriminate.
Content already in the public record, subscription appeals, even passing references to US regulatory proceedings were bundled into the censorship dragnet. Many recipients of the notices weren’t parties to the case at all. A private lawsuit morphed overnight into State-enforced mass censorship.
Ex Parte Justice, Ex Parte Injustice
Interim injunctions are supposed to be extraordinary remedies, sparingly granted when delay would cause irreparable harm. They require three conditions: a prima facie case, a balance of convenience, and a likelihood of irreparable injury. None of these were met here.
To silence journalists without hearing them is punishment without trial.
Worse, the Rohini order outsourced censorship to the plaintiff. It empowered Adani to compile its own rolling blacklist of URLs, which intermediaries had to erase within 36 hours. The judiciary abdicated its role, leaving the company as both accuser and censor. That is not the rule of law; it is private power stamped with a court seal.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting then compounded the error. Instead of pausing to ask whether such an order could survive constitutional scrutiny, it became an enthusiastic enforcer. It fired off notices demanding compliance within 36 hours, dragging in tech platforms and newsrooms alike.
By rushing to implement an overbroad, ex parte order, the State revealed an appetite for silencing critics of the powerful. The IT Rules, alre
.ady controversial, were repurposed from public accountability to corporate protection.
Gaming the Platforms
There is another dimension that courts must not ignore: how such orders weaponise the compliance machinery of social media platforms. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X are built to comply swiftly with government or court notices. Their algorithms and policies err on the side of deletion. When faced with a long list of flagged links backed by a government order, they act reflexively. They rarely pause to ask whether the takedown is proportionate, or whether it unfairly targets independent voices.
In this case, the result was devastating. Independent journalists and creators, who rely on their digital presence for credibility and livelihood, saw their work vanish overnight. Even harmless content — subscription appeals, satire, or references to public records — was wiped out.
The message was clear: platforms will always comply first and ask questions later.
This compliance-by-design makes ex parte gag orders uniquely dangerous in the digital era. A court order may only be a few pages long, but once it is fed into the compliance machinery of social media, it erases years of journalistic labour with the click of a button. Courts must reckon with these side effects. A gag order today is not just a legal restraint on a newspaper column. It is a deletion order across digital ecosystems, amplified by the architecture of platforms. Judicial restraint must account for this asymmetry — and err on the side of protecting speech.
Corporations Are Not Fragile Flowers
The true damage is not only in the videos and posts already deleted. It is in the climate of fear such takedowns create. If a journalist knows her work can be scrubbed before she is even heard in court, the rational instinct is self-censorship. If a satirist sees colleagues punished for jokes, he tones down his act. Over time, public debate thins out, until only praise for the powerful is left.
This is how free speech dies — not in a single dramatic stroke, but in the quiet silences that follow each unjust gag.
Defamation law was never meant to be a shield against scrutiny. A corporation of Adani’s scale is not a fragile flower whose reputation wilts at criticism. If investor confidence trembles at mere reportage, the answer lies in transparency and facts, not in silencing critics. The claim that critical reporting undermines India’s “brand image” is particularly pernicious. It reduces journalism to cheerleading, and courts to PR wings.
Democracy requires dissent. A business that straddles ports, power, and media must expect, and withstand, tough questions.
Fortunately, the court of the District judge has now quashed the ex parte gag order on appeal. This restores, for now, the balance tilted against journalists. But it is a fragile victory. The fact that such an order was granted and zealously executed should trouble us all.
The higher judiciary must now lay down guardrails:
No ex parte gag orders against the press, save in the rarest cases.
No delegation of censorship powers to corporations.
No government takedowns without precise judicial scrutiny.
And above all, recognition that digital takedowns, once ordered, ripple through platforms in ways that cause irreparable harm.
The Stakes for the Republic
This episode is not just about Adani or a handful of journalists. It is about whether India will remain a republic where citizens can question the mighty without fear of instant erasure. Free speech is the oxygen of our constitutional order.
Without it, every other right suffocates. Pre-censorship has long been disfavoured in law for this reason. It is more corrosive than punishment after publication, because it prevents the people from ever hearing the speech in the first place. When courts forget this, and governments exploit it, democracy itself is at risk.
The gag order may have been quashed, but its shadow lingers. It exposed how easily corporate power, judicial complacency, and government zeal can combine to suffocate speech.
It showed how social media platforms, built to obey, can be gamed to erase dissent. If we are to remain a constitutional democracy, our courts must be vigilant, our governments restrained, and our corporations reminded that reputations are earned through conduct, not decreed by injunction.
Anything less would mean that freedoms gained from a Constitution written after driving away the successors of the East India Company, will be lost to the diktats of another Company from West India.
(Sanjay Hegde is a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)