When a name becomes a sentence

A court can clear a person; the internet need not. Long after an acquittal, a name search returns the accusation, not the verdict. The Delhi High Court’s judgement in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v Union of India confronts that gap . It recognises a right to be forgotten as a facet of informational privacy under Article 21, and directs search engines and legal databases to de-index such names from search results, while the record itself stays intact.  

A batch of petitions before Justice Sachin Datta gathered a wide class of petitioners. Some were acquitted or discharged or had their FIRs quashed. Some were parties to matrimonial or private civil disputes. Their grievance was not that records existed. It was that name-based searches on Google and legal database platforms showed accusations or resolved litigation as results. This appeared to have damaged reputation, dignity, employment and family life.

The decade old lead petition filed in 2016 sought a right to be forgotten that would begin by delisting reported judgments. The Internet Freedom Foundation intervened. It warned that such a regime would erode the right to information.

The question was more precise than a simple clash between privacy and open justice. Does Article 21 permit de-indexing of judicial records from name-based results and masking of personal identifiers in public digital records? The Court rejects wholesale erasure and builds a middle path between permanent digital punishment and the public character of justice. 

Masking and de-indexing

Open justice requires that records be preserved, accessible and open to scrutiny. Search engines do not merely host information; they aggregate, rank and serve it in response to a name. The ranking can convert a past allegation into a present public identity. The judgement separates de-indexing from takedown. De-indexing does not delete the judgement or rewrite its reasoning. It does not block access by case number, citation, court or date. It only stops the record surfacing when the query is the person’s name. 

Masking replaces names and identifiers in the public version with neutral descriptions such as “X”, while the unredacted record stays with the court. A person who obtains de-indexing must seek it from the court that rendered the original order. 

Relief is generally available in three situations: 

1. acquittal, discharge or quashing; 
2. settlement or compounding, where the complainant no longer presses the accusation; and 
3. purely private civil or matrimonial disputes, where intimate family details carry no continuing public value. 

Relief is unavailable where a person stands convicted of an offence against women or children, or of an offence involving breach of public trust, whether as a public servant, an elected representative or a fiduciary. Public figures cannot invoke privacy to bury records of public conduct.

Legal database not required to remove the judgement

For legal databases, the court does not order judgements removed, but restricts name-based search in eligible cases. Such repositories are essential to open legal access, since official court websites are often fragmented and hard to search. A takedown would threaten that access. A name-search restriction is narrower and more proportionate.

On territorial scope, confining de-indexing to an Indian domain is futile if the results survive on global ones. It contemplates de-indexing across all versions of the search engine for the specified links. This is among the ruling’s more contested parts. Global reach touches jurisdiction, speech and the limits of a domestic remedy.

The judgement arrives while India’s data protection regime is still taking shape. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 recognises individual control over personal data, but how its right to erasure meets court records is underdeveloped. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 impose intermediary duties, yet were not built as a judicial-record privacy code.

What is the result of the judgement? 

The judgement’s strongest insight is that digital form changes the problem. A record in a dusty file room and one on the internet are not socially equivalent. Access is no longer binary; what matters is its mode, scale and purpose.

For journalists, this is no gag on reporting. It does not bar reporting of cases or their outcomes. But it asks for care in how old allegations are kept alive in searchable archives, especially where the law has cleared the person or the dispute was private. Criminal process can itself become punishment, and an acquittal often comes too late to undo the damage. If search results keep displaying allegations without context, the presumption of innocence is hollowed out.

There are real concerns. Overbroad claims can weaken public memory. Wealthy litigants may bury inconvenient history. Search engines may over-comply. Courts may face a flood of masking pleas. Writing in the Economic Times, lawyer Prashant Reddy T questions the foundation. Privacy in K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017), was declared chiefly against the state. Whether it binds a private search engine was left unsettled. The Court, according to Reddy, picks one strand without explaining why. He adds that Parliament considered an explicit right to be forgotten and declined to include it in the 2023 Act. The judgement treats the search engine as an active processor of personal data, bound through the intermediary rules and open to a constitutional direction.

His second objection bites harder. The framework treats every acquittal as an exoneration. A person cleared because the investigation collapsed, witnesses turned hostile or the judge was found wanting may claim the same relief as the genuinely innocent. He reads the test of legitimate public purpose as so loose that it “opens the door to arbitrary censorship”, and that the global order issued on a bare assertion of harm, untested as a civil trial would demand. The judgement answers only in part: relief is discretionary, and a court still weighs accuracy, relevance and role. On the acquittal won through a failed prosecution, the reasoning is thin.

The judgement also lands while the Supreme Court weighs the same terrain. In February, a Bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan stayed a separate Delhi High Court direction that had de-indexed news reports about a banker after his discharge. The question it framed is sharper: may the right to be forgotten reach accurate news reportage once proceedings end? That goes to the heart of open justice and press freedom.

The top court is also seized of a connected challenge by Indian Kanoon, having stayed a Madras High Court direction to pull an acquittal judgement from that database; it observed that judgements are public record which online reporters may publish. Justice Datta’s framework is built to meet this anxiety, since de-indexing leaves the judgement in place and curbs only retrieval by name. Whether the Supreme Court accepts that distinction, or reads even the de-indexing of reportage as too great an intrusion on the right to know, will decide how much of this judgement endures.

The judgement does not say the past can always be erased. It says the past need not always be chained to a person’s name. The court holds that open justice does not require endless digital exposure.