The Wire says website unblocked after portal removed article

The Wire news portal challenges government censorship after unblocking orders issued, sparking condemnation from journalistic bodies.

The Wire news portal said that unblocking orders were issued for its website shortly after it reached out to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting about the censorship of its website, it said in a statement on Saturday (May 10, 2025). As a precondition for removing the site, the site said that the government urged it to take down an article it had put out based on reporting by the U.S. publication CNN.

While the site has taken the article down, it noted that the original CNN story remained available, and said it would challenge the decision. The website’s blocking had drawn condemnation from multiple journalistic bodies, including the Press Club of India, DIGIPUB Foundation, and the Editors’ Guild of India. 

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“I am constrained to note that under the IT Act, the procedure your ministry should have followed was to first issue notice about the news story in question, then give The Wire a chance to present its views before the inter departmental committee and only then, in the event that the IDC insists on the story’s deletion, could you have taken the extreme step of blocking our website if we remained non-compliant,” the site’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan wrote to the government.

The committee Mr. Varadarajan was referring to is set up by the government, led by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, to adjudicate on blocking orders.

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“The impugned story was published at 0347 on May 8 and the information it reported about was widely available at least 12 hours earlier, from CNN, whose story has remained widely available in India since then. I fail to see why the government wants our story deleted and treated it as such a matter of emergency more than 24 hours after publication that no notice was even served to us and our entire website blocked,” Mr. Varadarajan said in his letter.