NEW DELHI (The Thursday Times) — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office summoned India’s telecom secretary on Saturday to explain how officials ordered internet providers to block 129 websites on the strength of forged high court orders, two government officials said.
Telecom Secretary Amit Agrawal, the most senior civil servant in the telecommunications ministry, cut short a trip to another state to appear before the Prime Minister’s Office, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Agrawal, the ministry, and the Prime Minister’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
“The action taken by the Department of Telecommunications against betting accounts was carried out through the relevant field officers,” one of the officials said.
The summons is the highest-level scrutiny yet since the forgeries came to light this week. The Department of Telecommunications had directed internet service providers this year to block the sites, most of them illegal betting platforms, after receiving two orders made out in the names of the Allahabad and Rajasthan high courts. Both courts have said they issued no such orders.
The documents carried fabricated court logos and seals and a QR code that led to an unrelated page, and they were emailed to officials by people posing as lawyers. Both orders sat for months on the department’s public website alongside the correspondence directing providers to take the sites down. On Saturday, one of the forged orders was still accessible on the government website, while the other had been removed.
Inquiry and police case
The ministry has opened an internal inquiry into its procedures and is considering additional checks before acting on court orders that seek website takedowns, an official with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.
“It’s serious … Maybe in future some genuine websites may also be blocked in the same manner,” the official said, adding that the ministry planned to revoke the blocking directions issued on the forged orders and was trying to trace the email addresses used to send them.
In Uttar Pradesh, where police registered a case of cheating and forgery against unknown persons on November 6 on the Allahabad High Court’s direction, cybercrime official Ghanshyam Yadav said investigators had asked the ministry for details of its content management system and its digital logs, and had sent it 24 questions. The ministry’s answers would shape the next steps in the investigation, he said.
Opposition politicians have questioned how the orders went unchecked. “(Why did the) ministry not even bother to verify the so-called court order … Beyond scary,” Saket Gokhale, an opposition politician, wrote on X.
Online betting is illegal in India, but the case has raised concerns that gaps in the government’s content-takedown system could allow falsified court papers to be used to block legitimate websites. It also comes amid wider unease over fake legal material: India’s Supreme Court in July set aside a tribunal’s orders that relied on judgments that did not exist.
