Foundation for Media Professionals: 4G restoration and the proportionality committee

The facts in brief

After Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (10 January 2020), the J&K administration restored 2G mobile internet on 25 January 2020 — a nominal partial restoration. The 4G blackout continued across the Union Territory. When India entered a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown on 25 March 2020, the 2G cap immediately collided with the pandemic's demands: schools migrated to video conferencing (unusable at 2G speeds), telemedicine became routine across the country but not in J&K, and remote work for J&K's services economy depended on bandwidth unavailable to its residents.

The Foundation for Media Professionals (a press-freedom NGO) filed W.P.(C) No. 525 of 2020 seeking restoration of 4G across J&K. Soayib Qureshi, a Srinagar advocate, filed W.P.(C) No. 530 of 2020. The Private Schools Association of J&K filed a connected petition pleading the right-to-education impact.

The Union and the UT defended the 2G cap on national-security grounds: militants, they argued, exploited high-speed connectivity for cross-border command-and-control and for circulating incitement material. The petitioners argued that the 2G/4G distinction was not a meaningful security distinction, since a device capable of carrying unlawful communications does so at 2G as readily as at 4G; that the territorial reach was overbroad — Jammu division and Ladakh had no comparable security profile; and that the temporal extent had crossed any conceivable necessity threshold given the pandemic.

The same bench that had decided Anuradha Bhasin heard the petitions over April and early May 2020 and delivered judgment on 11 May 2020.

The constitutional question

The immediate question was whether, given Anuradha Bhasin's four-prong proportionality framework, the continuation of a blanket 2G-only regime across the entire J&K Union Territory satisfied the necessity prong — specifically, whether the restriction was the least intrusive measure available to address the stated security concern. A secondary question was whether Articles 19 and 21, read together in the pandemic context, imposed heightened scrutiny on bandwidth restrictions that impaired education and health.

What the Court held

Bhasin applied — but with institutional constraint

The bench reaffirmed that any internet restriction in J&K must satisfy the Anuradha Bhasin proportionality test. It accepted that the restriction engaged not only Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g) but also the Article 21 dimensions of right to education and right to health, made acute by the COVID-19 lockdown. The pandemic materially altered the necessity calculus: services that had been a convenience at 4G became necessities.

The necessity-prong formulation

This formulation of the necessity prong is FMP's principal doctrinal contribution. It adds a calibration requirement to the Bhasin proportionality framework: restrictions must be calibrated by geography (districts with different security profiles may warrant different treatment) and by time (an emergency justification that was credible at the outset may not sustain a blanket restriction nine months later). A UT-wide restriction that does not differentiate by district security profile fails territorial calibration; one maintained without periodic reassessment of the specific threat level fails temporal calibration.

The Special Committee device

Rather than itself ordering 4G restoration, the bench constituted a Special Committee to examine the petitions' contentions and the administration's submissions. The Committee's composition:

• Union Home Secretary (Chair)
• Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, Government of India
• Chief Secretary, Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir

The Committee's terms of reference required it to examine the petitioners' contentions; review the necessity of internet restrictions in light of the pandemic; consider whether 4G could be restored on a trial basis in certain districts; conduct periodic review; and report to the Court. The bench declined to fix a calendar deadline for restoration but emphasised trial-basis restoration in lower-risk districts as a concrete pathway.

Article 21 crossover

The bench noted — without making it the ratio — that the right to education and right to health components of Article 21 were material to the necessity analysis. During a pandemic that had closed schools and physical health facilities across the country, bandwidth restrictions that prevented access to online education and telemedicine imposed Article 21 costs beyond the Article 19 framework.

Institutional deference on security calibration

The bench reaffirmed that national-security calibration of specific restrictions is primarily for the executive, with judicial review limited to the proportionality and procedural discipline Bhasin had established. It declined to second-guess the Union's assessment of the threat level — but held that the threat assessment itself must be periodically reconsidered and the restriction proportionally adjusted.

The doctrinal architecture

Foundation for Media Professionals sits at the intersection of three doctrinal streams that Anuradha Bhasin had separately opened.

The first is the Bhasin-proportionality application to a specific fact situation. The case demonstrates how the four-prong test operates when the necessity prong is the operative question: once a legitimate aim is accepted (national security; prevention of cross-border militancy communication), the focus shifts to whether the means adopted — a blanket 2G-only cap across an entire Union Territory — is the least restrictive available. The territorial and temporal calibration requirement supplies the doctrinal content of the necessity prong.

The second is the Article 21 crossover with Article 19 in the internet-access context. Bhasin had located internet protection in Article 19(1)(a) and (g); FMP begins to sketch the Article 21 dimension — education and health — that pandemic-era restrictions on connectivity engage. This crossover has downstream significance for post-COVID litigation on school closures, tele-medicine access, and minimum bandwidth obligations.

The third is the institutional deference / judicial activism balance in national-security cases. FMP chose the Special Committee device — deferring the fact-finding and calibration function to an executive-constituted committee under judicial oversight — rather than issuing a direct restoration order. The case is therefore also a study in how the Court positions itself relative to executive security determinations: it accepts the legitimacy of the concern, declines to substitute its own calibration, but insists on a structured process of proportionate recalibration.

The adjacent case from the cross-citation trail is Indian Council for Enviro-Legal Action v. Union of India (1996) 3 SCC 212, which established the continuing-mandamus / Special Committee institutional device that FMP imports into the internet-restriction context.

What the judgment did not decide

The bench did not order direct restoration of 4G — the central critique from press-freedom and digital-rights advocates. It did not prescribe a calendar deadline for the Special Committee's work, leaving the timeline unbounded. It did not answer whether bandwidth-throttling (2G imposition) is conceptually distinct from suspension for Article 19 purposes — a distinction with significant downstream consequences for policies that throttle rather than cut connectivity.

It did not rule on the contempt petition subsequently filed by the Foundation for Media Professionals when the Special Committee did not appear to convene and publish its decisions. And it did not resolve whether the right to education and right to health components of Article 21 themselves require a minimum bandwidth guarantee — a question that school-closure and tele-medicine litigation has inherited from this case.

After the order

The Special Committee's implementation record was thin. FMP filed a contempt petition in early June 2020 alleging that the Committee had not constituted itself in the form the Court intended; the Supreme Court asked the government in July 2020 hearings why the Committee's decisions were not being made public, but did not press the point to a dispositive order.

4G was restored in a phased manner: first in two districts — Ganderbal and Udhampur — on 16 August 2020, then across the entire Union Territory on 5 February 2021. The restoration came through an administration order rather than through the Special Committee's formal process — a result the petitioners had sought but achieved through a path that bypassed the judicial mechanism the Court had constituted.

The "Special Committee" device has not become a standard institutional template in subsequent shutdown litigation. The Court has returned to direct review in later matters, and the Bhasin Review Committee mechanism has been the operationalised framework. The SFLC.in litigation in 2023-24, which secured the 22 January 2024 order on publication of Review Committee decisions, relies on the Bhasin and FMP line for the proposition that the State's ongoing restriction-review process must be transparent.

FMP is now cited in shutdown petitions for two propositions above all: the territorial-and-temporal calibration formulation of the necessity prong, and the Article 21 (education and health) cross-engagement with Article 19 internet protection. Both remain live doctrinal questions as internet-restriction practice continues across states beyond J&K.

Related on Valkya

• Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India: internet as an Article 19 right
• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India: striking down Section 66A
• K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India: the nine-judge privacy declaration
• K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India — the Aadhaar judgment

Sources

1. Supreme Court Observer — "COVID & 4G Restoration in Jammu & Kashmir": https://www.scobserver.in/journal/covid-4g-restoration-in-jammu-kashmir/
2. Internet Freedom Foundation — "FMP approaches Special Committee established by SC for restoration of 4G internet in J&K": https://internetfreedom.in/fmp-approaches-special-committee-established-by-sc-for-restoration-of-4g-internet-in-j-k/
3. Global Freedom of Expression (Columbia) — FMP v. UT of J&K: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/foundation-for-media-professionals-v-union-territory-of-jammu-and-kashmir-anr/
4. LiveLaw — "Foundation Of Media Professionals Files Contempt Petition": https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/foundation-of-media-professionals-contempt-petition-over-non-constitution-of-special-committee-jk-internet-curbs-158053
5. MediaNama — "Why are decisions of Special Committee on internet restrictions in Kashmir not public?": https://www.medianama.com/2020/07/223-supreme-court-kashmir-4g-internet-contempt-petition/
6. BarandBench — Foundation for Media Professionals case digest: https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/foundation-for-media-professionals-supreme-court-internet-jammu-kashmir