Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India: the Delhi High Court's right-to-be-forgotten framework

The facts in brief

The lead petition, Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India (WP(C) 1021/2016), was filed before the Delhi High Court almost a decade ago. The petitioner — like the more than thirty other writ petitioners whose cases were eventually batched and disposed together — had been a party to judicial proceedings whose digital after-life had outlasted their legal closure. He had been acquitted, but his name continued to surface on the first page of Google search results pointing to the judgment, an associated news report, and an aggregated copy on Indian Kanoon.

The petitioners' biographies varied. Some had been acquitted in criminal trials. Some had been discharged at the stage of charge. Some were parties to matrimonial disputes whose private grievances had been adjudicated and were now indexed and searchable. Some appeared only incidentally — named witnesses, mentioned bystanders, persons whose identifiers had been preserved in a judgment that turned on someone else's conduct. Each came with the same request: remove their personal identifiers from search-engine indices and from the records of judicial-records aggregators.

The respondents included the Union of India (acting through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), Google LLC, Indian Kanoon, and a series of intervenors representing news media and open-justice interests. The petitions had been filed over nearly a decade — the earliest dating to 2016 — and had been heard together over an extended period before judgment was reserved. On 29 May 2026, Justice Sachin Datta pronounced a 144-page framework judgment disposing the batch.

The constitutional question

The principal question was whether, and on what terms, the Right to be Forgotten — already endorsed in principle by the Orissa High Court in Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha (2020) and the Delhi High Court in Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India (2021) — could be operationalised against search engines and judicial-records aggregators consistently with open-justice values and constitutional speech protection.

Three sub-questions threaded through the petitions. First, does Article 21, after K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), include a right to be forgotten as part of informational privacy? Second, if so, what is its relationship with Article 19(1)(a) speech interests, open justice, archival integrity, and the public interest in legal-records accessibility? Third, how is the principle to be enforced — through what directions to which intermediaries, against what proportionality framework, and with what safeguards for the underlying judicial reasoning?

What the Court held

Right to be Forgotten as a facet of Article 21

Justice Datta held that the Right to be Forgotten is an integral facet of the fundamental right to privacy under Article 21. The right derives directly from the informational-privacy dimension of Puttaswamy and addresses the qualitative novelty of the digital environment — where information about an individual, once posted, can persist and resurface indefinitely, independent of its continuing relevance.

The right is not absolute. It is qualified by competing interests in free speech, open justice, archival integrity, and legitimate public interest. The judgment's central institutional move is to convert this principled balance into a workable operational framework rather than leaving it to ad hoc case-by-case determinations.

The masking-and-de-indexing framework

The framework rests on a careful distinction between identifiers and substance. Under the directions, only personal names and identifiers are concealed; the reasoning, findings, and legal conclusions of the underlying judgments remain publicly accessible. The framework therefore preserves judicial transparency and the value of precedent while protecting individuals from the dignity-harm of perpetual name-based searchability.

The operative directions run along four tracks. Search-engine operators, including Google LLC, are directed to de-index the relevant content, orders, judgments, and associated reportage from name-based search results. Indian Kanoon is directed to restrict name-based search functionality for the records of identified petitioners, with judgments remaining accessible by case number, citation, court details, and date. The redacted versions become the public-facing copies; unredacted versions remain in court records and are available for legitimate legal purposes, including reliance in subsequent proceedings. And the framework is calibrated through a proportionality assessment in each case rather than applied as a flat entitlement.

The five-factor proportionality test

Whether a particular petitioner is entitled to the framework's protection is determined by a structured proportionality assessment turning on five factors: the nature of the information; its continuing relevance; public interest considerations; the impact on the individual's dignity and reputation; and the time elapsed since the underlying event. The factors are designed to weed out frivolous requests while ensuring that genuine dignity-harm — particularly to acquitted persons, discharged accused, and parties to matrimonial disputes — is recognised and remedied.

The test resists rigid categorisation. A high-profile prosecution of a public figure may resist de-indexing on continuing-relevance and public-interest grounds even years later. A private acquittal of an ordinary citizen for an offence that left no public-policy footprint may satisfy the test even relatively soon after pronouncement.

Intermediary obligations after Shreya Singhal

The judgment situates its directions within the post-Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) intermediary architecture. Section 79 IT Act's safe-harbour regime, read down in Shreya Singhal to operate against a court order or a government notification, is not displaced by the framework. The directions issued by the Court are themselves court orders within that architecture, and intermediaries are bound to comply.

The framework also reads the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 into the broader privacy ecosystem. Section 12 DPDP, on the right to correction and erasure of personal data, anticipates the framework's logic in the data-protection register; the framework, in turn, supplies a constitutional-court template that the DPDP Board (once operational) will likely draw on in its section 12 enforcement guidance.

The doctrinal architecture

The judgment makes three interlocking doctrinal moves. First, it operationalises the Puttaswamy informational-privacy principle through enforceable directions to intermediaries. Puttaswamy recognised informational privacy as a constitutional value; the framework gives it operational teeth in the specific context of judicial records and search-engine indexing.

Second, it transcends the precursor Indian High Court rulings. Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha (2020) and Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India (2021) had recognised the Right to be Forgotten in principle and offered narrow relief on the facts. The Delhi judgment converts principle into a reusable framework — a five-factor test, a directional template for intermediaries, and a discipline of redaction-not-suppression. It is the first Indian decision to do so at this length and with this institutional ambition.

Third, it stakes out a middle path between two competing maximalist positions. The judgment rejects the absolutist transparency claim that all judicial records must remain perpetually name-searchable. It equally rejects the absolutist privacy claim that individuals can demand erasure of judgments in which they featured. The middle path — preserve reasoning, mask identifiers, calibrate by proportionality — protects open justice and dignity simultaneously rather than treating them as zero-sum.

What the judgment did not decide

The framework operates within the existing intermediary-liability architecture; it did not revisit the Shreya Singhal read-down of Section 79 or the section 69A blocking regime. Whether the framework reaches non-Indian intermediaries with the same extraterritorial force as it reaches Google's India-facing index was not exhaustively examined and will likely be tested in subsequent litigation.

The judgment did not lay down a mechanism for prospective applications by individuals not part of the batch. The five-factor test is articulated, but the institutional pathway — whether through fresh writ petitions, through a Registry-mediated process, or through the DPDP Board once it is operational — is left to be settled in practice. The interaction between the framework and the news-media archive — particularly whether news outlets can be directed to redact reportage as opposed to merely losing search-discoverability — was addressed in respect of the named petitioners but will require deeper articulation in future cases.

After the judgment

The immediate institutional consequence is that Google and Indian Kanoon must implement the framework in respect of the identified petitioners. Indian Kanoon's compliance posture is particularly significant because it is the most heavily used judicial-records aggregator in India: case-number and citation-based search continues unimpaired, but name-based search returns no result for petitioners covered by the framework.

The framework will rapidly become a template for other High Courts adjudicating similar batches of right-to-be-forgotten petitions. Madras, Karnataka, Calcutta and Kerala have pending cases that will draw on the Delhi template. Expect Special Leave Petition filings from intermediaries or news-media intervenors raising extraterritoriality and section 79 implications. A Supreme Court intervention is plausible given the cross-cutting implications for open justice, intermediary regulation, and informational privacy.

The framework also reshapes how courts draft judgments. Two-version judgments — a public masked copy and an internal unmasked copy — are likely to become routine in matters where dignity-harm is foreseeable: matrimonial disputes, acquittals on technical grounds, cases involving sexual offences (where the Nipun Saxena line already requires anonymisation), and matters incidentally naming third parties. The DPDP Board's eventual section 12 enforcement guidance is likely to cite the framework as the constitutional-court anchor for its operational rules.

Related on Valkya

• K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India: the nine-judge privacy declaration
• Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha: the right to be forgotten precursor
• Jorawer Singh Mundy v. Union of India: the right to be forgotten in name-based search
• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India: striking down Section 66A

Sources

1. LiveLaw — "Delhi High Court recognises Right to be Forgotten, lays down framework for de-indexing judicial records": https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/delhi-high-court/delhi-high-court-recognises-right-to-be-forgotten-lays-down-framework-for-de-indexing-judicial-records-536376
2. Bar and Bench — "Right to be Forgotten: Delhi High Court lays down guidelines for masking personal details in court orders": https://www.barandbench.com/news/right-to-be-forgotten-delhi-high-court-lays-down-guidelines-for-masking-personal-details-in-court-orders
3. ANI News — "Delhi HC recognises Right to be Forgotten, says digital records cannot subject individuals to endless reputational harm": https://aninews.in/news/national/general-news/delhi-hc-recognises-right-to-be-forgotten-says-digital-records-cannot-subject-individuals-to-endless-reputational-harm20260601114656/
4. Supreme Court Observer — Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India case page (foundational privacy authority): https://www.scobserver.in/cases/puttaswamy-v-union-of-india-fundamental-right-to-privacy-case-background/
5. Internet Freedom Foundation — coverage of the right-to-be-forgotten doctrinal trajectory in India: https://internetfreedom.in/