Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India: interim delisting of an Indian acquittal

The facts in brief

The petitioner, Jorawer Singh Mundy, is an American citizen of Indian origin. In April 2009, he was arrested in India under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 in a case registered at the Delhi airport on his arrival from the United States. The case was prosecuted by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence. After a full trial, he was acquitted by the Trial Court in 2011. The Delhi High Court, in a DRI appeal, upheld the acquittal in 2013.

Despite the acquittal having been judicially affirmed at two levels nearly a decade earlier, news reports of his initial arrest and prosecution continued to appear prominently in Google search results when his name was queried. The petitioner stated on affidavit that the persistence of these results had caused him to be denied admission to a United States law school, had affected his employment prospects, and had inflicted ongoing reputational and dignitary harm.

Multiple representations to Google and to the relevant Indian news portals had not resulted in de-indexing or takedown. He invoked the writ jurisdiction of the Delhi High Court under Article 226, filing WP(C) No. 3918 of 2020, seeking directions to Google LLC, Google India Pvt. Ltd., and several Indian portals — Indian Kanoon and others — to remove or de-index the offending URLs. He also sought a declaration that his right to be forgotten under Article 21 had been violated. The petition impleaded the Union of India, through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, as Respondent No. 1.

The respondents resisted on three grounds. There was no statutory framework for a right to be forgotten in India. Search engines are mere intermediaries, with safe-harbour under s.79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. And the public interest in access to historic news reports — including reports of judicial proceedings — outweighed the petitioner's individual claim.

The legal question

The question was whether, in the absence of a comprehensive statutory framework, the writ jurisdiction of the High Court under Article 226 could be invoked to direct intermediaries — including a global search engine — to de-index lawful third-party content that had become an instrument of continuing Article 21 harm to the petitioner.

A linked question was whether the judicial fact of acquittal itself altered the constitutional calculus. Pre-arrest reportage of a serious offence sits in the public-interest spectrum. Post-acquittal persistence of that same reportage, with no contemporaneous public-interest justification, sits in a different place. Does the acquittal trigger a constitutional shift in the balance, or does it leave the press's archival rights untouched?

What the Court held

Interim relief granted

Pratibha M. Singh J. granted interim relief. The Court held that the petitioner had made out a prima facie case that his right to privacy under Article 21 — as articulated in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1 — was being violated by the continued availability of the prosecution material despite the affirmed acquittal.

The right to be forgotten and the right to be left alone

The petitioner's right to privacy, of which the "right to be forgotten" and the "right to be left alone" are inherent aspects, would need to be protected.

The Court read the right to be forgotten as one facet of a broader cluster — informational privacy, dignity, and the right to be left alone — together anchoring the petitioner's Article 21 claim. The framing tracks the Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha (2020 SCC OnLine Ori 878) treatment but supplies an additional dimension: the right to be left alone, with its echoes of Govind v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1975) 2 SCC 148 and Warren and Brandeis's classical privacy formulation.

Balance of convenience and irreparable harm

The continued availability on the internet of the material in question relating to the petitioner, who has been acquitted of the offence, is contrary to his right to dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution.

The Court found that the balance of convenience favoured the petitioner. The irreparable harm to a citizen who had been judicially acquitted continued to compound, while the public interest in continued access to specifically-named historic news reports was attenuated. The petitioner had shown that representations to the intermediaries had been unanswered or refused, justifying judicial intervention.

Operative directions

The Court directed Google LLC, Google India Pvt. Ltd., and Indian Kanoon to remove the offending URLs from search results during the pendency of the writ petition. Notice was issued to the respondents. The matter was listed for final hearing on the question whether the right to be forgotten should be made permanent.

The interim order is operationally significant for two reasons. It issued directions to a global search engine from an Indian writ court, exercising the High Court's Article 226 jurisdiction in a way that has clear extraterritorial implications. And it crystallised the post-acquittal de-indexing claim as a recognised category of right-to-be-forgotten litigation, distinct from victim-protection contexts (where Subhranshu Rout operates).

Legislative humility

Justice Singh refrained from laying down a general framework. She expressly noted that legislative action through the Personal Data Protection Bill — then pending, now operationalised as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — was the appropriate vehicle for a comprehensive solution. The interim order's reasoning is deliberately calibrated to the particular facts: an affirmed acquittal, a documented refusal of representations, a demonstrable career impact.

The doctrinal architecture

Jorawer Singh Mundy operates on three doctrinal axes.

It applies the Puttaswamy informational-privacy framework to a third-party intermediary takedown context in the writ jurisdiction. Subhranshu Rout had operated through bail and connected criminal-miscellaneous applications; Mundy operates through an Article 226 writ. The two cases together establish that the right-to-be-forgotten claim can be brought through either jurisdictional pathway, with the Article 226 writ being the more direct route where the petitioner is the affected party seeking relief against intermediaries.

It articulates the balance-of-convenience framework for interim de-indexing relief. The petitioner must show: a prima facie Article 21 claim; balance of convenience favouring immediate relief; irreparable harm if relief is not granted; and documented refusal of out-of-court representations. The four-part framework is now the template that subsequent High Courts have applied.

It crystallises acquittal as a triggering event. Once a court has acquitted a person — and the acquittal has been affirmed on appeal — the public-interest justification for continued indexing of arrest-stage reportage attenuates. The justification does not vanish entirely, but it shifts. The petitioner's individual dignity claim now sits opposite a substantially weakened public-interest counterweight.

The adjacent precedent that Mundy operates within includes Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha (2020 SCC OnLine Ori 878) as the doctrinal foundation, and Zulfiqar Ahman Khan v. Quintillion Business Media (2019 SCC OnLine Del 8494) as the earlier Delhi HC groundwork on third-party content takedown in privacy claims.

What the judgment did not decide

The order is interim only. The final question whether the right to be forgotten exists as an enforceable right against private intermediaries in India was left for full hearing. The balancing framework between Article 19(1)(a) free press and Article 21 privacy was not articulated as a multi-factor test.

The question whether the right survives in cases of conviction — as opposed to acquittal — was expressly left open. The extraterritorial reach of the order — whether Google LLC must de-index globally or only on google.co.in — was not addressed. The standard of intermediary liability under s.79 of the IT Act and the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 was not fully analysed.

The question whether media publishers — as distinct from search-engine indexers — have a different duty was not resolved. The petition's broader prayer for declaratory relief was deferred to final disposal.

After the order

Jorawer Singh Mundy became the operative Delhi High Court authority on post-acquittal de-indexing. It is now routinely cited.

The companion Kuldeep Singh v. Union of India (WP(C) 7280/2021, Delhi HC, Pratibha M. Singh J. again — 18 August 2022) extended the relief to a conviction that was subsequently overturned. Ashutosh Kaushik v. Union of India (WP(C) 1308/2021, Delhi HC, 2022) — the actor seeking de-indexing of a decade-old drink-driving arrest — applied Mundy. Karthick Theodore v. Registrar General (Madras HC, 4 August 2021) and Vysakh K.G. v. Union of India (2023 SCC OnLine Ker 480, Kerala HC) cite Mundy as foundational.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 s.12 now provides a statutory right to correction and erasure of personal data. But the s.17(2)(a) state-instrumentality exemption, combined with the absence in DPDP of a settled journalism-archival carve-out, has meant the courts continue to deploy the Mundy line for cases against search engines and other intermediaries where DPDP rights do not run or run incompletely.

The Supreme Court has accepted multiple SLPs raising the right-to-be-forgotten question but the final pronouncement is pending. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's IT Rules, 2021 — Rule 3(2) grievance-redressal architecture — now provides the first-instance forum for content-removal requests, with Mundy operating as the constitutional safety net where the intermediary's first-instance disposition is unsatisfactory.

Related on Valkya

• Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha: the right to be forgotten for survivors
• K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India: the nine-judge privacy declaration
• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India: striking down Section 66A
• DPDP Rules 2025 — a practitioner's read

Sources

1. SCC OnLine — Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India, 2021 SCC OnLine Del 2306 (primary citation): https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2021/04/13/delhi-high-court-right-to-be-forgotten/
2. LiveLaw — "Delhi HC Recognises 'Right To Be Forgotten' & 'Right To Be Left Alone' As Inherent Aspect Of Right To Privacy": https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/delhi-high-court-right-to-be-forgotten-jorawer-singh-mundy-172575
3. BarandBench — "Delhi HC grants interim relief in right to be forgotten plea against Google": https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/delhi-high-court-right-to-be-forgotten-google-jorawer-singh-mundy
4. Global Freedom of Expression (Columbia) — Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India case page: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/jorawer-singh-mundy-v-union-of-india/
5. Internet Freedom Foundation — Right-to-be-forgotten litigation tracker: https://internetfreedom.in/right-to-be-forgotten-india-jurisprudence/
6. SCC OnLine Blog — "Right to be forgotten and the post-acquittal claim": https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2021/04/right-to-be-forgotten-delhi-high-court-mundy/