New Delhi: The veteran journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta has accused his web hosting provider of “backdoor censorship” after his website, paranjoy.in, was abruptly taken offline on Wednesday, days after he was served with a court order demanding the removal of one article.

In a public statement issued on Saturday, Mr Guha Thakurta said the site, which has served for twelve years as an archive of his decades of work as a journalist, author, publisher and documentary-maker, went dark on the morning of 28 October. Its subdomains, including media.paranjoy.in and adanifiles.paranjoy.in, were also taken down.

He said the hosting company, Hostinger, gave no warning or chance to respond. When a colleague contacted customer support at 6.48am, a hosting specialist reportedly said the suspension followed an abuse report alleging “Fraud/Scam” and that reinstatement was “not negotiable in this case”.

The suspension came days after Mr Guha Thakurta was served with an ex parte ad interim injunction, issued on 24 October by a district and sessions judge at the Patiala House Courts in Delhi. The order was obtained by Indiabulls Nests Limited and its founder, Sameer Gehlaut, in Civil Suit No. 529/2026. Mr Guha Thakurta is named as Defendant No. 19. It directs the removal and de-indexing of an article on his website, listed as Item A-33 in the suit’s schedule.

The article is linked to a report published on NewsClick on 30 September 2019. Indiabulls Housing Finance filed a criminal defamation complaint over that report in March 2020 against NewsClick, its staff, and Mr Guha Thakurta. According to his statement, a magistrate dropped proceedings against NewsClick’s editor, Prabir Purkayastha, in June 2025 but issued summonses to the four remaining accused.

Mr Guha Thakurta said Mr Gehlaut’s counsel sent him a legal notice on 27 August demanding removal of the article within 48 hours. On 26 October, he said, Mr Gehlaut emailed him personally, threatening contempt proceedings under Civil Procedure. The suit is next listed on 18 December.

On the same day, he said, Mr Gehlaut’s lawyers submitted a takedown complaint to Google. The Lumen Database record, which Mr Guha Thakurta cites, shows the complaint covered 52 URLs across outlets including The Economic Times, Business Standard, The Caravan, Livemint and The Quint, as well as social media posts. Google notified him on 28 October that it was blocking one URL from search results in India.

Mr Guha Thakurta said Hostinger did not cite the court order when it suspended his account. He called the fraud allegation “demonstrably false”, pointing to checks on 28 October in which VirusTotal reported that none of 92 security vendors flagged his domains as malicious, and Google Safe Browsing found “no unsafe content”.

He noted that most of the other reports named in the takedown list remain online, including the original NewsClick article. “Yet, in the case of paranjoy.in, the entire domain and every website hosted on my account were wiped off the internet,” he said.

He argued that even where a court orders a specific URL removed, a host has no justification for pulling an entire domain without notice. He put four questions to Hostinger: who filed the report and when; what verification was carried out; why no notice was given; and why the suspension was deemed non-negotiable.

Mr Guha Thakurta said his legal advisers were taking steps in court against both the injunction and the suspension. He warned that such action through hosting providers set “a dangerous precedent” for media independence and for freedom of expression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.

(Hostinger, Mr Gehlaut and Indiabulls Nests Limited had not publicly responded to the allegations at the time of writing. The claims above are drawn from Mr Guha Thakurta’s statement and have not been independently verified.)