Jalandhar(04/05/2025): Friends, by now you all must have heard the news that on 29/04/2025, the central government of India had a YouTube channel named “4PM” blocked.
Please note that this channel used to heavily support the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), often praising it and, on the other hand, fiercely criticizing the BJP. This channel had a decent following. Considering concerns around press freedom, the step taken by the central government to shut down the channel deserves strong condemnation.
Following this incident, we decided to look into the state of press freedom in Punjab, where the Aam Aadmi Party is in power—the very party this “4PM” channel praised day and night. Let’s discuss what we found:
On 09/05/2024, an FIR was registered in Zirakpur, Punjab, naming senior journalist Sardar Rajinder Singh Taggar as a accused. During the hearing, the Dera Bassi court, citing the IT Act 2000 and the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules 2021, ordered the blocking of Rajinder Singh Taggar’s Facebook page on 30/05/2024.
According to the latest reports, this news Facebook page remains blocked. Taggar is facing several criminal cases, and while the legitimacy of these cases is a matter for debate, sources from journalist circles say that he(rajinder singh taggar) has already spent about five months in jail just due to his journalistic work only.
The matter doesn’t end there. A senior official in the Punjab government, formerly the chief of Punjab Vigilance, also filed an application in a Mohali court to have several of Taggar’s videos removed from social media. We do not know how truthful those videos were, but according to court documents, they were removed on the grounds of being defamatory, false, and misleading. Legal proceedings between Taggar and the complainant police officer are still ongoing, with further attempts to have more videos removed.
Let’s move on to Jalandhar Police. On 21/07/2024, allegations emerged that the police extorted nearly 4 crore rupees from a businessman named Puneet Sood from Hoshiarpur. Chandigarh-based journalist Manpreet Randhawa reported on the matter through video journalism. Afterward, he was pressured to delete the videos.
When that didn’t work, Kamaljeet, the SHO of Navi Baradari Police Station under Jalandhar Police, filed an application in a Jalandhar court and secured an ex parte order demanding the removal of the impugned video from all social media platforms. The case is ongoing in Jalandhar court, and one of the city's top lawyers, advocate Prashant Sareen, has taken up Manpreet Randhawa’s case.
Now let’s talk about Ludhiana, known as Punjab’s financial capital. Recently, an audio recording went viral on social media in which a man is heard negotiating with a woman. The authenticity of the audio is still unverified, some media channels gave it prominent coverage. Soon after, a social activist appeared and filed an application in a Ludhiana lower court, asking for the audio to be removed from social media to prevent public trust in the government machinery from being eroded. The court quickly ordered the removal of the audio from all platforms.
A crucial point to note here is that the same Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules 2021, under which these lower courts are ordering content takedowns, include Clause 15. This clause mandates that a designated officer must first investigate whether the content warrants removal. Only after the investigation, a report is sent to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which can then instruct social media platforms to take action.
So the surprising question is: when the power to remove content lies with the central government, how are lower courts in Punjab issuing such takedown orders? This is hard to understand.
In the matter of the Ludhiana audio, a media organization called Panj Dariya Vigilant Media Pvt. Ltd. approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The High Court stayed the ex parte injunction order issued by the Ludhiana court. The next hearing in this case in P&H high court is scheduled for 29/07/2025.
That covers all the media-related issues. Apart from these, Punjab Police's cyber division recently wrote to social media platform X (formerly Twitter), requesting that the account of Sardar Sukhpal Khaira, the sitting Congress MLA from Bholath and a prominent figure in Punjab politics, be suspended. X informed Sukhpal Khaira of this request via email, which he shared with the media.
That’s all the information available for now. We are not here to say whether the central government, Punjab Police officials, or other Punjab government officers are right or wrong in doing all this. We simply want the people of the country to form their own opinions.
