Two takedown demands submitted to X/Twitter in the name of a Delhi Police Special Commissioner sought the removal of posts by the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), SFLC.in and others, as well as the removal of their entire accounts. On 6 November, X told the Delhi High Court that an impostor had submitted the reports. The Indian Express reported that Delhi Police counsel in court even denied issuing them. Both IFF and SFLC sought clarification from the police but got nothing: IFF had sent a notice to Delhi Police and SFLC.in sought clarification from senior officers and via official emails.
What happened to them mirrors what the recipients of thousands of instances of content takedowns in India face: all they get from Facebook, Instagram, and X is a message that they got a request from a government department for takedown, typically with no copy of the exact complaint filed, the rationale given and no recourse.
Many users, including, for example, Cartoonist Satish Acharya, have found that their accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers, have been removed or restricted in India without a hearing, checks or balance.
Apar Gupta and I wrote in April that with illegal amendments to the IT Rules, India's Ministry of Electronics and IT has built an infrastructure for censorship without transparency, accountability and recourse for citizens. In February 2026, the government allowed police administrations to authorise more than one such officer and shortened the platform's response period from 36 hours to three.
By design, this enables censorship at pace and scale while rendering platform checks moot.
Censorship, Not Security
A genuine government intimation under Rule 3(1)(d) must identify the legal provision, the alleged unlawful act and the specific content. A police intimation must come from a specially authorised officer of at least Deputy Inspector General rank. The rules also require monthly review by a Secretary-level officer.
In practice, however, such a system that is designed by bureaucrats, with orders issued by bureaucrats, cannot be accountable if it is checked by bureaucrats who have no incentive or independence to hold each other accountable, especially given the decay and corruption in India's bureaucracy, where incentives are aligned against transparency and accountability. Let's for forget that X went to court against the Sahyog portal, and our courts failed to hold the government to account, in turn enabling this expansion of censorship.
The Indian Express also reported that Meta had integrated its API with Sahyog so requests could be processed without a separate human review: this indicates that everything sought to be censored by police and government bodies gets censored automatically. This is also probably a part of the plan: the government would want an expansion of the Sahyog portal so that everything that a government department wants censored gets censored without a platform pushing back against them.
A Gujarat Police RTI reply reported by MediaNama recorded 5,358 notices covering 190,633 URLs flagged through the Sahyog portal, an average of one URL every six minutes.
The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, which runs Sahyog, told MediaNama that issuing agencies hold detailed records of notices and actions. This is a design decision in order to avoid accountability. RTI’s will thus have to be filed with each government agency across the country to understand the scale of censorship
As is evident in the case of SFLC.in and IFF, the burden of proof for recourse, transparency, and accountability has been transferred entirely to the citizen, with the platform being given absolutely no power or time to question the legality of takedowns.
For the ministry and police there are no checks, or there's an expectation that the system checks itself.
An act of censorship by a government agency is a violation of our fundamental rights. What we have here is a clear case of abuse of power by design: a system that enables the violation of fundamental rights without adequate protection and recourse.
Govt Must be Accountable
What we need instead is exactly the opposite: to transfer the burden of proof to the Indian government.
First, for the Sahyog Portal to be dismantled because it is illegal and unconstitutional, and not enabled by law.
Second, for each issuing authority to maintain publicly available statistics of censorship orders sent, to which platform and over what period of time, and impacting which accounts, and the legal issue given the content, and if needed, after redaction of offending or personal information.
Third, for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to maintain aggregate records publicly, as well as its own assessment. Fourth, for each order issued, the ability for recourse, and a requisite timeline for the government agency to address the grievance of the user that is equal to the time given to the platform for takedowns.
Fifth, for accountability of the issuing authority: an act of illegal censorship of legitimate speech should hold the issuing authority accountability for the violation of a citizens fundamental rights.
Governments have more power and authority than platforms and citizens and they must now be forced to exercise this power responsibily.
Six, account blocking should be out of the ambit of this provision: it censors not just existing speech but legitimate past and future speech.
2026 should be remembered for the abuse of power by the government of India, not just on the streets of Delhi but online as well.
(Nikhil Pahwa is the founder of MediaNama. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)