A Critical Appraisal In Light Of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav vs. Union of India
The proliferation of digital archiving and search-engine indexing has fundamentally altered the durability of personal information. Information that would once have faded with the passage of time, or become practically inaccessible, now persists indefinitely in a permanently searchable and retrievable form. This has given rise to a distinct category of harm: the perpetual association of an individual with events, however outdated or resolved, that continue to surface upon a simple name-based search.
This concern has arisen concretely before the Delhi High Court in a series of petitions. In one such case, a petitioner against whom criminal proceedings had been initiated continued to face adverse consequences during employment background checks, notwithstanding that his acquittal had attained finality. This was because judicial orders relating to the proceedings, containing particulars identifying his children, had been publicly reported and remained accessible online.
[1] In another, an individual whose wife’s demise had been reported in the press together with his name found that every search of his name surfaced the circumstances of her passing.
[2] In a third, a family that had been party to a civil suit for property possession found that a judgment recording sensitive details of a family member’s attempted suicide was the first result returned upon a search of their name.
[3] Each petitioner sought protection of informational privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution, presenting the Court with the underlying question of whether, and to what extent, Indian law recognises a right to be forgotten by the internet.
This article examines that question in two parts.
Part I traces the doctrinal origins of the Right to be Forgotten (“RTBF”), from its conceptual foundations in American privacy jurisprudence to its codification in EU law, before surveying the trajectory of Indian case law preceding the Delhi High Court’s recent decision in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav case.
Part II examines that decision in detail, offering a critical appraisal of its reasoning, its practical implications for litigants and institutions, and recommendations for the path ahead.
The foundations of informational privacy trace to Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review essay, titled ‘The Right to Privacy’ which argued that the common law had always protected, in fragmented form, a general right to be “let alone.” Warren and Brandeis located the underlying interest not in property or reputation as conventionally understood, but in personal autonomy: the right of an individual to control what is said, written, and shown about them. They drew an analogy to copyright doctrine, which protects an author’s right to determine whether to publish their own work, and extended that logic to personality, image, and private life.[4]
Warren’s conviction found later expression in Justice Brandeis’s dissent in Olmstead v. United States, which characterised the following as a violation of the Fourth Amendment:
“Every unjustifiable intrusion … upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment… Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.
— Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)
This dissent anticipated the surveillance anxieties that would come to define subsequent decades. The right to privacy subsequently found expression in international instruments, including Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (1950), and Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), each recognising protection against arbitrary interference with private life. Concurrently, a related but distinct concern also emerged, that is not merely the protection of private affairs, but the ability to move on from one’s past. The United Kingdom’s Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, 1974 relieved reformed convicts of the obligation to disclose their convictions after a defined period,
[4] while French law recognised a cognate “droit à l’oubli” permitting objection to the republication of details of a person’s criminal conviction or incarceration.
[5] Both regimes proceeded from the premise that a person who has served their sentence and rebuilt their life ought not to be perpetually defined by it.
In India, the Supreme Court laid the constitutional foundation for informational privacy in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, holding that the right to privacy is a facet of the right to life under Article 21, and that publication of private matters without consent, whether truthful or otherwise, renders the publisher liable in damages.
[6] In 1995, the European Parliament and Council enacted Directive 95/46/EC, the European Community’s first legislative measure on personal data protection, which obligated Member States to guarantee data subjects a right to seek erasure, rectification, or blocking of personal data processed in contravention of the Directive.
[7] Although the Directive did not yet articulate a “right to be forgotten” in express terms, it supplied the statutory basis on which that right would later be judicially recognised.
That recognition arose from the case of one Mario Costeja González, a Spanish national whose 1998 property auction notice, published in a newspaper and subsequently digitised, continued to surface in Google search results of his name years after the underlying debt had been settled. González sought removal of the search results on the ground that their continued availability caused disproportionate harm to his reputation, invoking the protections under Directive 95/46/EC.
The Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its ruling on 13 May 2014,[1] holding, first, that a search engine operator is itself responsible for the processing of personal data appearing on third-party web pages, and thereby qualifies as a “data controller” for the purposes of the Directive; and second, that such an operator is obligated to consider requests to remove links to information surfacing on a name-based search, irrespective of the continued lawful availability of the underlying content at its original source.
The Court established a calibrated standard: removal is warranted where the search results are inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes of the original publication, having regard to the time elapsed since publication, but must be weighed against competing considerations including the nature and sensitivity of the information and the public interest in access to it, particularly where the individual concerned plays a role in public life. Where a request is refused, the individual retains recourse to the relevant regulatory authority. Critically, the Court required Google to de-link the disputed material from name-based searches without directing the newspaper to alter or remove the original publication, thereby crafting the remedy of de-indexing rather than erasure, being one that preserves the historical record while severing its automatic and consolidated association with the individual concerned.
The European legislature subsequently codified this position through the General Data Protection Regulation, adopted in 2016 and in force from 2018. Article 17 GDPR, titled “Right to Erasure,” gave the right formal statutory expression and established objective criteria governing deletion requests. Article 17(2) extends the obligation beyond the immediate controller, requiring that where a controller has made personal data public and is subsequently required to erase it, reasonable steps must also be taken to inform other controllers processing that data, including those hosting copies, of the erasure request.
Indian statute law had, prior to the judicial development of RTBF, already reflected related concerns regarding informational privacy. Section 228A of the Indian Penal Code prohibits disclosure of the identity of sexual assault victims; FIRs registered under Section 376 IPC are anonymised; pseudonyms are employed in appeals under Section 372 of the Code of Criminal Procedure; and the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 recognises a “principle of a fresh start” under which a juvenile in conflict with the law is not to be permanently defined by that encounter. What remained absent, however, was a constitutional anchor for these scattered protections. That anchor was supplied by the Supreme Court’s nine-judge decision in
K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India,
[1] which held the right to privacy to be a fundamental right under the Constitution. In the same proceeding, the Court held that retention of personal data under the Aadhaar Regulations for a period of five years was excessive and violative of the individual’s right to be forgotten, directing that the retention period be reduced accordingly. RTBF thereby acquired recognition as a matter of Indian constitutional law.
A series of High Court decisions has since developed the doctrine along varying lines. In
Sri Vasunathan v. Registrar General,
[2] the Karnataka High Court directed the masking of a woman’s name in a judicial record, recognising the harm caused by online accessibility of personal information.
In Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan v. Quintillion Business Media Pvt. Ltd.
,[1] the Delhi High Court granted interim relief directing removal of #MeToo-related allegations and associated search results, a decision criticised for its potential to restrict public discourse before adjudication of the underlying allegations. In
Subhranshu Rout v. State of Odisha,
[2] the Court linked RTBF to the constitutional right to privacy and called for a legislative mechanism enabling victims to secure removal of harmful online content. This victim-centred approach was extended in
[3] where the Delhi High Court ordered removal of non-consensually circulated intimate videos of an actress, holding RTBF to be an integral facet of the right to privacy available to address such violations of dignity.
The most emphatic articulation of the doctrine came in
[4] where a petitioner acquitted of criminal charges argued that continued online availability of the judgment naming him adversely affected his employment prospects. HMJ Amit Mahajan observed that “there is no reason why an individual who has been duly cleared of any guilt by law should be allowed to be haunted by the remnants of such accusations easily accessible to the public,” and directed search engines to de-index the judgment while leaving the judicial record itself undisturbed.
A more cautious approach followed in
Karthick Theodore v. Registrar General, High Court of Madras,
[5] where a Division Bench directed redaction of names and takedown of a judgment from the Indian Kanoon database. This more expansive direction, effectively removing a judicial record from public access, has been challenged before the Supreme Court and final adjudication remains pending.
Vysakh K.G. v. Union of India,
[7] the Kerala High Court acknowledged privacy as a fundamental right and the evolving doctrine of informational self-determination, but declined to grant relief, holding that in the absence of a clear statutory framework the judiciary ought to exercise restraint, and that the task of constructing a comprehensive regime for data erasure and anonymity in judicial records belongs more appropriately to the legislature.
Taken together, these decisions reflected an unresolved negotiation between the individual’s interest in informational privacy and the public interest in transparency and access to judicial records, and between judicial innovation and institutional restraint pending legislative action. The law, as it stood prior to the Delhi High Court’s intervention, was marked by divergent approaches across High Courts, an absence of consistent evaluative standards, and an open question as to the appropriate institutional actor to resolve it.
It was against this backdrop of accumulated but unreconciled precedent that the Delhi High Court came to decide Laksh Vir Singh Yadav, examined in Part II, which sought to consolidate these competing strands into a coherent framework for the recognition and enforcement of the right to be forgotten in India.
[1] Petitioner in W.P.(C) 11553/2021. Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India, 2026 SCC OnLine Del 4491 ( Para 228).
[2] Petitioner in W.P.(C) 8658/2022. Ibid at Para 15.
[3] Petitioner in W.P.(C) 12179/2024. Ibid at Para 44.
[4]Warren & Brandeis, THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY, Harvard Law Review (1890). Available at: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html (Accessed: 12 July 2026).
[5] Ministry of Justice, Rehabilitation of Offenders, (Oct. 15, 2010), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/216089/rehabilitation-offenders.pdf. (Accessed: 12 July 2026).
[6] French Government Secures “Right to Be Forgotten” on the Internet, (Oct. 21, 2010), Available at: https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-cybersecurity-law-blog/french-government-secures-right-to-be-forgotten-on-the-internet. (Accessed: 12 July 2026)
[7] AIR 1995 SC 264 (Para 26).
[8] European Parliament, Council of the European Union, Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, Available at: http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/1995/46/oj (Accessed: 12 July 2026).
[9] Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González. ECLI identifier: ECLI:EU:C:2014:317.
[11] 2017 SCC OnLine Kar 424.
[12] 2019 SCC OnLine Del 8494.
[13] 2020 SCC OnLine Ori 878.
[14] 2021 SCC OnLine Del 4193.
[15] 2024 SCC OnLine Del 8113.
[16] 2021 SCC OnLine Mad 2755
[17] SLP (C) No. 15311 of 2024.
[18] 2022 SCC OnLine Ker 7337.
The article is authored by Mr. Nayan Mittal (Senior Associate), Ms.Vanshika Gupta (Associate), Mr. Kanishk Sharma (Assessment Intern)
