Adani land award and gag order, troubling precedent despite relief

The controversy over a Delhi court’s injunction in favour of Adani Enterprises Limited (AEL) has taken a sharper turn, with the Editors Guild of India voicing concern that public debate on corporate deals is being stifled.

The case stems from reporting around the 2,400 MW Adani Power project in Pirpainti, Bihar, where opposition parties allege that the Group was allotted over 1,000 acres of land and vast tracts of fruit-bearing and timber trees at a nominal lease. While the Bihar government insists the project was awarded through due process, questions on the nature and fairness of the award have triggered widespread scrutiny.

Successive governments, both at the state and central level, have a long record of granting large land parcels at concessional rates to industrial and power projects. The Tata Nano project in Singur, Ultra Mega Power Projects in states like Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and Reliance’s SEZ ventures all benefitted from such state support. These precedents show that concessional land awards are not new to India’s industrial policy.

What is new, however, is the judicial step of restraining critical voices from examining such awards. Earlier this month, a Delhi court barred nine journalists, activists and entities from publishing or circulating “unverified, unsubstantiated and ex facie defamatory” content about AEL, and directed that existing reports be taken down within five days. More unusually, the order gave the company itself the power to forward any link it deemed defamatory to platforms and government agencies, who would then be obliged to remove it within 36 hours.

Following challenges, the court has now partly quashed the gag order with respect to four journalists, ruling that such an injunction could not stand without hearing them. But the fact that such a sweeping order was issued at all, before the journalists were even heard, is deeply troubling.

The Editors Guild described this as a dangerous precedent: a system where a corporation not only benefits from concessional access to public land but also wields judicially endorsed powers to silence criticism. “A free and fearless press is indispensable to democracy. Any system that allows private interests to unilaterally silence critical or uncomfortable voices poses a serious risk to the public’s right to know,” the Guild said.

Independent content creators echoed the concern, with YouTuber Akash Banerjee noting that hundreds of his videos were ordered to be taken down within 36 hours without any opportunity to contest the claims.

Investment in power infrastructure is vital, but the coupling of state largesse in the form of land awards with judicial suppression of scrutiny sets a worrying template. The precedent is not only about land or power, but about how far India is willing to let corporations and institutions decide what its citizens can ask and what they cannot.