In March 2024, the Supreme Court warned that an interim injunction against journalism can become a “death sentence.” In fact, the court’s judgment in “Bloomberg Television Production Services India Pvt Ltd v. Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd” held as much. Two years later, the Delhi high court appears to have imposed that restraint again, in “Badminton Association of India v Union of India.”On June 19, a bench of Justice Tejas Karia issued the order, directing the Union government to secure removal of reports, videos and posts about the Second International Bar and Bench Badminton Championship held in London on June 7. The order goes beyond the named URLs and covers every “identical, mirrored, modified, edited, clipped, reproduced, re-uploaded, derivative or substantially similar” version of the material. Intermediaries must take down, block, de-index and restrict access within 24 hours of the government notification. Furthermore, portals, bloggers, account holders and uploaders may not republish or circulate the content; nor may the public. Intermediaries must also surrender the names, addresses, contact details, emails, bank details and internet protocol (IP) logs of the uploaders to facilitate legal action.The order flowed from an Article 226 petition filed by the Badminton Association of India. The newspapers, journalists, YouTube channels, social media users and the All India Lawyers Union whose work was condemned were not parties and neither were they heard before the court declared the material “ex facie false, malicious and derogatory.”An ex parte injunction is not unlawful in itself. Courts may issue urgent interim orders without first hearing the opposing party. However, when an order restrains journalism and public debate, the Supreme Court demands an exceptionally strong justification, a criterion the badminton order did not fulfil. Regardless, all listed material was removed at once, without hearing testimonies from a single publisher.What the government actually fact-checkedMisinformation was certainly in circulation.On June 10, the Press Information Bureau’s Fact Check Unit rejected claims that Union Ministers Kiren Rijiju and Arjun Ram Meghwal had flown to London for a badminton event with the judges. The viral photographs, it said, came from an All India Judges’ Badminton Championship at Delhi’s Thyagaraj Stadium in November 2025. The post denied the rumour that the ministers travelled to London for the championship. The Ministry of Law and Justice then issued its own statement, rejecting reports that Meghwal travelled with 75 Supreme Court and high court judges to the tournament. The statement said he was in Bikaner on the relevant date, corroborating PIB’s claim that old Delhi photos were being re-circulated and wrongly attributed to the London championship.Statement on false and misleading claims being circulated on various media and digital platforms. pic.twitter.com/I2D5bFbIZa— Ministry of Law and Justice (@MLJ_GoI) June 11, 2026Although these corrections were necessary, their reach was limited. The fact-check failed to establish that every report questioning the legitimacy of the event was false. Even as the Union government informed the court that two Allahabad high court judges had travelled to London in their personal capacity, a contemporaneous report, citing the event at Dormers Wells Leisure Centre in Southall on June 7, listed Justice Tej Pratap Tiwari and Justice Avnish Saxena among the winners. The same two judges were named as participants by the Print and National Herald. Thus, instead of conceding that they took part, the government said their visit had been a private one. This distinction deserves examination. A limited fact-check cannot serve as proof of every report being fabricated.The same logic governs the centre’s claims about the Chief Justice of India, who according to them was on an official visit to London and did not participate in the event. A distinguished visit announced by Queen Mary University and reports of talks on artificial intelligence and cross-border dispute resolution confirm his engagements. It was, therefore, egregious to pass off photographs of CJI Surya Kant playing badminton in Delhi as images of him at the London tournament. Nevertheless, this does not disprove reports which questioned whether his London visit bore any relation to the event. Reports that disputed the rumour were removed with it!The order’s clearest weakness emerges from the very articles it directs the government to remove.The National Herald article expressly mentioned that 75 judges did not travel to London. It confirmed that Meghwal did not attend the event – quoting the government’s clarification – and reported that two Allahabad high court judges had travelled and played there. The article also raised pressing questions regarding the event’s sponsorship, the law ministry’s role, expenses involved and the propriety of judges joining privately organised events. These inquiries may have benign answers, yet merely pointing them out is vastly different from claiming that 75 judges and two ministers flew out together at the public’s expense.Print’s report also cited the PIB and law ministry statements, with a subheading explicitly recording that allegations against Meghwal had been refuted as fake. It also identified the two high court judges as Justice Avnish Saxena and Justice Tej Pratap Tiwari. A Tribune report likewise affirmed that neither the ministers nor the CJI participated in the event, while maintaining its stance on the ministry’s association with the championship and the lawyers’ and judges’ participation. These reports may be held accountable for carrying wider headlines than their actual content or for blurring confirmed facts, allegations and questions. A court could fairly order the correction of a sentence, headline, photograph or attribution proven to be untrue. But such defects do not make the entire article fictitious or malicious.The order runs no article-by-article analysis. It does not identify false sentences, analyse the clarifications reproduced or separate a publication’s own assertion from an allegation, opinion, or question on propriety. Instead, it brackets YouTube programmes that allegedly claimed 75 judges accompanied the law minister, along with news articles that clearly said differently. A judicial finding cannot safely rest on a list of headlines and URLs alone, while the publications’ contents and defences remain unexamined. Was the court bound to hear the publishers?The Supreme Court’s judgment in “Bloomberg v Zee” lays down the principles. The court held that the usual tests for interim relief, a prima facie case, balance of convenience and irreparable injury, apply with special care in cases where journalistic freedoms are restrained. Courts must give detailed reasons that weigh the constitutional values of free speech and public participation.An ex parte injunction, it notes, should be issued only in exceptional cases. In a defamation dispute with a media publisher, the content must be palpably false or malicious. Additionally, any defence the publisher might raise must be bound to fail at trial. An injunction granted without a hearing could become a “death sentence,” the material losing all relevance before the dispute is settled. Hence, the position is significantly more nuanced than a flat rule against urgent takedowns: A court may order one in a special case, but it must reason why the publication is so plainly indefensible that waiting for a hearing would cause irreparable injury. Despite the court using words like “ex facie false,” “malicious” and “systematic misinformation campaign,” the aforementioned articles evidence that the material was not uniformly false. Each carried at least a part of the official denial and distinguished, to some degree, between the disproved claim and the reported participation of two judges.The publishers could have been asked to produce sources, explain headlines, highlight assertions mentioning third-party criticism, identify correct photographs or correct particular errors. Thus, this was not a case where every conceivable defence was bound to fail.The central task was to bifurcate viral rumours and the ensuing genuine questions, making a prior hearing essential or, at the minimum, a prompt post-decisional hearing before irreversible removal.The unusual choice of a writ petitionThe chosen legal vehicle prompts further queries. This was not a contempt petition or a defamation suit claiming injury to reputation. Rather, it was a petition filed under Article 226 of the constitution by the badminton association against the Union of India.The order records that the association is the national governing body for badminton and that the publications were derogatory to the judiciary, the executive and the sport. However, most of the impugned speech concerned judicial independence, foreign travel, ministerial involvement and possible public spending. Moreover, the ruling does not explain how the association acquired standing to seek removal of speech said to harm the CJI, courts, individual judges and Union ministers. Nor does it expand on why a writ petition against the government was the forum to decide on sharply disputed facts, ordinarily tested in a defamation case after publishers are heard. A public-law proceeding against the government, thus, became the route to relief against publishers who were never even presented before the court. Though this does not indicate that the petition was filed at anyone’s behest, the unusual alignment between petitioner and respondent and the glaring absence of any adversary called for closer scrutiny.Can section 69A be used this way?The high court ordered the Union to issue a notification under the Information Technology Act (ITA), the rules framed under it, or “any other applicable law.” It does not clearly specify the statutory route.Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, permits blocking only when the government or an authorised officer deems it necessary or expedient on the following grounds: the sovereignty and integrity of India; the defence of India; the security of the state; friendly relations with foreign states; public order; and preventing incitement to a cognisable offence relating to those subjects.Defamation or injury to institutional reputation is not among them.The procedure is spelt out in the 2009 Blocking Rules. In “Shreya Singhal v Union of India,” the Supreme Court upheld Section 69A of ITA partly because it was narrowly drawn: confined to grounds tied to Article 19(2), requiring recorded reasons and carrying procedural safeguards. The originator and intermediary are ordinarily entitled to a hearing before the designated committee. The court also recognised a distinct route, a court order to an intermediary under Section 79 of ITA.The trouble is not that a court ordered online material removed. It is that the executive was directed to issue a notification under unspecified provisions, without mentioning the reasons for blocking, how the content fell within these grounds or how the safeguards would function once all material had been declared false. The order, as a result, demands the blocking machinery to enforce a conclusion reached without hearing originators or publishers.The demand for bank detailsThe direction relating to subscriber information is especially intrusive. The court ordered intermediaries to preserve and produce the personal information of account holders behind the material, asking the government to begin legal action against them. It named no offence for which bank information was needed nor explained how financial data would contribute to proving a post as fake. It did not elaborate on why ordinary subscriber details would not suffice or why every uploader was reasonably suspected of a crime. As a consequence, the directives may expose not only anonymous propagators of fabricated material, but also journalists, commentators and ordinary users who shared mixed reports containing facts, disputed claims and opinions.The order was wider than it needed to beThe breadth of the injunction does not stop at the doctored Delhi photographs or at the false claim suggesting 75 judges and two ministers travelled together. It spans any material “featuring or purporting to depict” the involvement of the CJI, judges and ministers in the London event. When read literally, it could swallow an accurate report that the CJI was in London but did not attend or that two high court judges were named as participants. The bar on “substantially similar” versions offers no workable test for what triggers removal.Faced with uncertain limits and the threat of action, intermediaries will inevitably take down more than necessary. That is how an over-broad injunction chills speech: accurate reporting and fair comment vanish alongside the misinformation. The order may even hamper reporting on the proceedings themselves, since describing the enjoined claims could arguably count as circulating them.Narrower remedies were available. The court could have called for the false photographs to be corrected, barred repetition of the specific travel claims or required publications to carry the official clarifications. It could have issued a notice and held an expedited hearing within days, restraining only the most demonstrably false content. Proportionality demanded that it ask whether a lesser measure would do. The order does not show that it did.Confidence through scrutinyFalse information about judges deserves prompt correction. Passing off old photographs as foreign images is indefensible, as is portraying ministers as abroad when they were in India. Yet, public confidence in courts is not secured by treating every uncomfortable question as an attack on the institution. Judicial independence is a fit subject for debate, along with the relationships among judges, lawyers, governments and sponsors. Questions about foreign travel, official support and the appearance of proximity cannot be placed beyond scrutiny because some claims surrounding the event were fabricated.The remedy for erroneous journalism is a precise correction and, where needed, a narrowly reasoned order against the false statement. It is not an injunction that gives a limited fact-check the force of conclusive proof, decides disputed facts without hearing the speakers, hands a broad removal exercise to the executive and demands financial data for prospective action.The judiciary can easily survive inaccurate criticism. Its authority is better served by evidencing that even those accused of maligning it will get the hearing promised under the rule of law.