The Supreme Court of India, New Delhi, PhotographrIncognito/Adobe Stock

Between October 2024 and September 2025, government agencies, district-level officials and police in India issued over 300 requests for online content to be removed, according to data revealed under the country’s Right to Information Act. Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 2025 alone, India’s Free Speech Collective reported 329 incidents relating to the suppression of free speech in the country.

These incidents included the arrest of several journalists, such as Dilwar Hussain Mozumder. He was arrested twice in March after reporting on a protest against alleged corruption and accused of ‘criminal intimidation’ and ‘offensive remarks’, among other things. Mozumder’s lawyer has claimed that his treatment ‘was a clear attempt to harass and intimidate the journalist’, while the Indian Journalists Union said the charges appeared to be ‘trumped up’. In November meanwhile, two journalists were detained in Delhi while covering a protest against air pollution – despite identifying themselves as press – after local police denied permission for the demonstration to continue.

Freedom of speech and expression, assembly, association, movement, residence and profession are protected under Article 19 of India’s Constitution. Despite this, freedom of expression is under threat in the country, say commentators, who worry the situation will only get worse. ‘The fundamental rights of freedom of expression and free speech are slowly getting diluted day by day, month by month, year by year,’ says Dushyant Dave, a former president of the Indian Supreme Court Bar Association.

‘In a diverse society with multiple fault lines, authorities often cite the need to prevent communal tensions and maintain public order as justification for restrictions on expression,’ says Gaurav Arora, an officer of the IBA Media Law Committee who speaks in a personal capacity.

India’s anti-terror and criminal defamation legislation, preventive detention laws and section 69a of the Information Technology Act – which grants the government the ability to block online information in the name of security and public order – are all used to suppress freedom of expression, say commentators. ‘Genuine and perceived threats to national security, particularly in border regions and in the context of terrorism, have led to a more cautious approach towards speech that is deemed potentially destabilising,’ says Arora.

Naman Kumar, legal counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation – which defends online freedom, privacy and innovation in India – believes this shrinking space for public discourse mainly results from the government’s desire to control its image and that of the big business it wants to attract. ‘They would like to provide that kind of environment to their corporate friends [where] journalists do not talk about them,’ he says.

The Indian government didn’t provide comment in response to Global Insight’s requests. However, its Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has previously stated that the Indian government ‘respects the right of people to ask questions and also criticise on […] social media platforms,’ adding that ‘India has a glorious tradition of free speech and democratic practices dating back centuries’.

Various Indian courts have ruled on the balance between maintaining order and protecting freedom of expression. In autumn 2024 for example, the Madras High Court ruled that not all cases where misinformation is shared require legal action to be taken, particularly where there’s not an immediate threat to public order. And in 2023 the Bombay High Court struck down amendments to India’s Information Technology Rules, which would have allowed the country’s government to create a ‘Fact Check Unit’ (FCU). The FCU was intended to scrutinise and remove content perceived to be false or misleading about the government, but the Court declared the amendment to be unconstitutional.

‘The judiciary continues to play a crucial role in balancing these competing interests, though the outcomes have been mixed, with some judgments reinforcing protections whilst others have upheld restrictions,’ says Arora. India’s legal and administrative systems, he says, can ‘sometimes struggle to distinguish between legitimate restrictions on harmful speech and overreach that stifles legitimate dissent.’

‘Unless [the] courts begin to treat shutdowns and forced content removals with the same constitutional urgency they now attach […] to individual dignity and liberty, digital throttling will remain the state’s pressure valve of choice,’ says Basu.

Given the circumstances, the best thing the legal profession can do, says Arora, is to bring strategic cases that can establish protective precedents, educate the public on their rights and hold authorities accountable to constitutional standards whilst resisting the pressure to misuse legal processes.

For Arora, the current situation reflects India’s ongoing negotiation between its democratic traditions and the challenges of governing a large, diverse and rapidly changing society. ‘There appears to be an ongoing renegotiation of the boundaries of acceptable public discourse, with different segments of society holding varying views on where those boundaries should lie,’ he says.