Why Delhi HC judgment on ‘right to be forgotten’ has the legal fraternity divided

On May 29, the Delhi High Court set out to change that. Justice Sachin Datta held that the “right to be forgotten” is a facet of the fundamental right to privacy under Article 21. His 144-page judgment, made public on June 1, is the most detailed framework an Indian court has built on the subject. It is also a quiet test of a hard question. When should the internet be allowed to forget?

The verdict decided a batch of more than 35 petitions, some pending since 2016. The petitioners shared one grievance. Their names, tied to closed Delhi high court cases, kept surfacing online and trailing them everywhere. Several had been acquitted or discharged. Others had settled matrimonial disputes or seen FIRs quashed. A few appeared in judgments only in passing.

Justice Datta drew a careful line between three things. Deletion would remove a judgment altogether and the court refused it. Masking hides a person’s name within the public version of a judgment. De-indexing, the central remedy, stops a name from summoning the record on a search engine. The reasoning, findings and law stay public. Only name-based discoverability shrinks.

The record itself survives. It remains reachable by case number, citation, court and date. As Justice Datta noted, drawing on Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul’s take in the 2017 Supreme Court privacy judgment, “human beings forget but the internet does not”. People, the Delhi high court reasoned, should not be defined forever by an old accusation that has lost relevance.

Google and other search engines were told to de-index records where relief was granted. Indian Kanoon must switch off name-based searches for the listed judgments while keeping them reachable by citation. The court treated the platform as a publisher, not a passive pipe. Its directions apply across a search engine’s global domains, not only google.co.in. Compliance was mandated within two weeks.

The Delhi HC judgement in this case has persuasive value before other HCs, in case petitioners before other High Courts want similar relief in the form of deindexing. But other HCs may disagree from the Delhi HC reasoning, in which case only Supreme Court can intervene and resolve differences. However, the Delhi HC's judgment giving relief in individual cases will apply globally against the search engines. It is binding on them.If Google or X does not accept the judgment, it cannot simply refuse to comply; it must challenge it. As the ruling is by a single judge in writ jurisdiction, the appeal lies first to a division bench of the Delhi high court through an intra-court appeal (known in legal terms as a letters patent appeal) and from there, if pursued, to the Supreme Court by special leave. Until a stay or reversal, the direction binds them.

“The jurisprudence on the right to be forgotten is still evolving. The High Court in this case has tried to balance the right to privacy vis-a-vis the right to open court and transparency,” says retired senior cop RK Vij.

Cyber security expert Akancha Srivastava, too, finds the judgment to be a “necessary step in strengthening India’s digital privacy and cyber safety framework”. “The judgment recognises a very real digital-age harm. A person may be acquitted, discharged, legally cleared, or otherwise protected by law, yet their name may continue to appear in online search results for years. That can cause lasting harm to dignity, reputation, employment prospects, family life, and mental well-being,” she says.

Srivastava adds: “I also appreciate that the court has taken a careful approach. Judicial records remain accessible through case number, citation, court details, and date. The relief is focused on reducing disproportionate name-based search visibility where continued exposure causes harm and serves no meaningful public interest. This is a fair and necessary privacy protection for legally cleared persons, victims, and private citizens facing lifelong digital stigma. It must be applied carefully, with public-interest safeguards, transparency, and protection against misuse.”

But the judgment has also raised concerns in some quarters, with legal experts debating the justification of the de-indexing and whether it will allow the petitioner ease of hiding history.

“If you were an accused, it is not a negative thing; it is part of your history. It can't just evaporate. If Google mentions this fact, we can't obliterate the fact of life. It's neither negative nor positive. It mentions a thing which is a fact. Therefore, I don’t agree with this judgment, which is in favour of de-indexing,” says Justice VN Sinha, former judge, Patna High Court, now a senior Supreme Court advocate.

Some have also raised doubts about de-indexing in cases where innocence has not been conclusively established, or where settlement between parties has resulted in closing the case (not uncommon in cases of a domestic or sexual nature).

Also read: Why in Kerala, World Cup flex wars are reflective of football being a lived experience in the state

Some of the petitions that resulted in the Delhi high court ruling appear simple enough. Take the case of a doctor, who had sought to change his name and while applying for the United States Medical Licensing Examination “was advised to rectify discrepancies arising on account of change in name through a court decree”. The “continued availability of the said judgment, containing his personal details, infringes his right to privacy”, he contended.

But there are cases which, though in the past, might continue to have relevance or serve to impart cautionary information to the public if they can be easily accessed in the public domain.

A petitioner in the case, a practicing doctor, “stated to be an internationally recognised figure in the fight against HIV-AIDS”, asked for the “removal of news items and articles pertaining to his arrest on 23.04.1999 in connection with an FIR alleging, inter alia, illegal procurement of medicines from abroad and mishandling of HIV patients”, claiming that “the material is no longer relevant, as he was discharged” in the case. One wonders, however, that though the availability of material pertaining to the case might indeed cause “grave prejudice” to his “dignity and reputation”, as he has claimed, considering that he is still practicing, do patients not have a right to knowledge of his history?

In another instance, a petitioner who had been “acquitted of the charges of rape and criminal intimidation” contended that “continued availability of the judgment upon a name-based search is gravely prejudicial, causing loss of reputation and humiliation. The petitioner urges that the identity of persons accused of sexual offences ought to be concealed upon acquittal, to prevent stigma and societal prejudice”. Again, in such cases, should the urgency be in protecting the accused or the survivor of the alleged crime?

The Delhi high court ruling did not appear from nowhere. In 2021, the same court gave interim protection to Jorawer Singh Mundy, an American of Indian origin, acquitted in a narcotics case. His acquittal still topped his search results and, he claimed, cost him work. His petition was among those finally decided in this batch. The court ordered the judgment blocked from search.

The deeper root is the Justice KS Puttaswamy (retired) vs Union of India case, the 2017 nine-judge Supreme Court verdict, which made privacy a fundamental right. Justice Datta also relied on judgments from foreign jurisdictions. The European Union’s Google Spain ruling of 2014, which held that a search engine does not merely carry information; it ranks and amplifies it. The Delhi high court borrowed that logic. The real injury, it said, lies not in the record but in how a search engine turns it into an instant, name-linked result.

India still has no statute that grants a right to be forgotten. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, the rules of which were notified in November 2025, offers only a narrow right to erasure. It covers data a person shared on consent. It does not reach court records, and it exempts the State. Justice Datta acknowledged the gap. The absence of a law, he held, does not stop a constitutional court from enforcing the right.

The court did not open the floodgates. De-indexing is not automatic. Each plea turns on a balancing test. It weighs the nature of the case, the time elapsed, the harm and any surviving public interest. Some doors stay firmly shut. A person convicted of an offence against women or children cannot be forgotten. Nor can a public servant convicted of abusing public trust. Public figures keep facing scrutiny for their public conduct.

As N Kavitha Rameshwar, an advocate at the Madras high court puts it, “There is a thin line which separates crime against the society and the individual. Certain offences will not come under compounding. The State is free to pursue such cases even if the de facto complainant withdraws.”

In case of de-indexing, she suggests a test of “overbearing public interest”. “If someone is seeking public office, the court can simply refuse to de-index. And remember, employers already separate an honourable acquittal from an acquittal on benefit of doubt, and the second kind can still cost you a job,” Rameshwar adds.

One of the petitioners in the Delhi high court case, identified as a “public figure, who, working as a television artist, has appeared in various reality shows/daily soaps”, sought the “removal of posts, videos and articles depicting several incidents of drunken behaviour said to have occurred more than a decade ago”. The court declined relief here, arguing that the “right to be forgotten, as articulated in this judgment, is primarily a protection for private individuals against the disproportionate perpetuation of information whose legal or social foundation has been extinguished. It is not a mechanism for the selective erasure of past conduct by those who have voluntarily assumed a public identity. “If the content complained of is demonstrably false or inaccurate, a separate cause of action in defamation may be available through appropriate proceedings,” the court added.

The framework reaches even the dead. Indian law holds that privacy dies with the person and cannot be inherited, as the Madras High Court ruled in the 2021 Jayalalithaa biopic case, refusing to restrain the makers of the web series. The Delhi court agrees that an accused who dies is never vindicated, so no right to be forgotten truly arises. Yet it still de-indexed one such name on proportionality, to spare the family. The man had been accused of rape and died on bail before any trial. His name now drops off a search, though no court ever ruled on the charge.

What of those who served their time and want a clean slate? The court is sympathetic in principle. It invokes the idea of “spent convictions” and a right to rehabilitation, and accepts that people change and may remake their lives. But sympathy is not a blank cheque. It refused a man convicted of fraud and blackmail in Britain, sentenced to nine years, who served his term and was freed in 2021. His crimes stay relevant to anyone dealing with him, the court held, and his conviction was too recent to fade. A conviction may lose its sting with enough time, it accepted, but completing a sentence, by itself, is not enough.

Also read: Why Google’s new AI Mode search engine is good news for users, not for businesses

Here lies the difficulty that the framework cannot fully resolve. The bright line guards against convictions. Yet most criminal cases never end in one. They close through acquittal, withdrawal, compounding or a quiet settlement. The court allows de-indexing in these cases, too, judged case by case.

The court’s own logic explains why. Its absolute bar rests on a conviction, anchored in Article 15(3) and laws such as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. A settlement produces no conviction. So a molestation or cruelty complaint that ends in compromise falls outside the bar. It drops into the discretionary zone, where a judge weighs whatever, public interest survives.

But as any lawyer who has argued such cases will point out, a settlement is not a finding of innocence. It merely closes a file without clearing a man. In many cases of sexual harassment, cruelty or domestic abuse, the parties compromise and the case is quashed, sometimes under pressure. Families compromise for money, exhaustion or a daughter’s own marriage prospects, and none of that means the conduct did not happen. Such a record could now be de-indexed. On Google, the accused’s name turns clean. And once the record slips out of a simple search, the next employer or family weighing a proposal loses its one warning.

The worry bites in everyday vetting. Families weighing a marriage proposal turn to Google, not court databases. So do small employers, landlords and matchmakers. For them, de-indexing can hide a useful warning. A repeat offender who keeps settling could stay permanently unsearchable.

“The Court's order for de-indexing is far too broad and will shrink the internet. The right to privacy, like other fundamental rights, should apply only against the state, not private search engines and databases,” argues Prashant Reddy T, lawyer and co-author of Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India's District Courts.

In an opinion piece written for Economic Times Reddy further questions why the public should lose record, given that an acquittal need not mean innocence. A prosecution can collapse through a botched probe, a hostile witness or a biased judge. The framework, he argues, treats acquittal as vindication when it is sometimes only an escape.

Rameshwar disagrees. In her view, a court weighing a de-indexing plea ought not to ask how the accused secured the acquittal. “The court is deciding on de-indexing, not retrying the case. It has no business asking how the acquittal was won,” she says.

Reddy, in his opinion piece, also presses a wider charge. The court, he says, went past Parliament’s own choice. The DPDP Act left this right out, and an earlier Bill carrying it was dropped. He faults the test for putting the onus on the person seeking secrecy. He also notes the court ordered global de-indexing on a bare claim of harm, without testing the evidence.

The Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights group, has fought this very case since 2016. It warned the court that a broad right to be forgotten could let private parties pull public information off the internet. That, it argued, would chip at free expression and the right to know.

The other side is just as weighty. De-indexing is not deletion and the judgment endures. A formal background check through court records or a citation will still surface. Police verification stays untouched. Only the casual name-search loses the link. The acquitted, the court reasoned, should not wear a permanent digital brand for a charge they defeated.

One of the lawyers who argued for de-indexing might put the opposite case. The alternative, the counsel might say, is a life sentence by search engine. A client acquitted in 2014 still cannot find work, because the first result is a decade-old arrest. De-indexing erases nothing. It only stops a stale accusation from being the first thing the world sees.

There is a fairness point too. An arrest that dominates search results, with the acquittal buried beneath, is not transparent. The court called such ranking a “perverse extension” of open justice. Open courts, it held, were meant to keep the process visible, not to punish a person forever.

An editor might bristle that the order reaches journalism, not only judgments. The ruling lets names be stripped from search results that surface old news reports, the editor might say. A story that was accurate when published does not turn false with time. Pushing it below the reach of a name search, the editor might argue, quietly thins the public record.

Also read: How professional instability is shaping financial planning, career choices for Indians

Practical doubts linger. Global de-indexing tests how far one country’s court can reach across the internet, and Google has resisted worldwide orders before. Masking must be sought from each original court, which could swamp trial judges. Every successful applicant must return to the court that wrote the judgment to seek it. How quickly courts move will decide whether the right works in practice or only on paper.

For now, the framework leans towards mercy for the exonerated.

A man who lived for years with such a result might describe the relief plainly. He was cleared, he might say, but the internet never was. At every interview and on every rental form, he braced for someone to type his name. Now, perhaps, he can stop bracing.

The harder cases sit in the grey zone of the settled and the compromised. There, the court has handed judges a balancing test and trusted them to use it with care. Whether that trust is repaid, case by case, will decide if India has learnt to forget wisely or merely to look away.