ABSTRACT
The right to be forgotten (“RTBF”) the claim of an individual to have information about them delinked, de-indexed, or erased from public digital access has moved in India from a marginal privacy doctrine into a live constitutional controversy. The Delhi High Court’s 144-page ruling in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v Union of India (2026), Indian courts have increasingly recognised RTBF as a facet of the right to privacy and dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution, though without expressly invoking the four-fold proportionality standard that the Supreme Court’s own Aadhaar judgment supplies for testing exactly this kind of interference.. This article traces the doctrinal journey of RTBF in India from Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017), through the divergent approaches of the Madras, Kerala, and Delhi High Courts, to the pending Supreme Court appeals concerning the removal of judgments and news reports and examines the limited statutory erasure right under Section 12 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, demonstrating why that provision, confined to consent-based processing, cannot address requests concerning judicial records, which are public acts of the State. the United Kingdom’s fact-sensitive balancing in NT1 & NT2 v Google LLC, Canada’s confrontation with the territorial limits of de-indexing in Google v Equustek, and the United States’ First-Amendment-driven rejection of the right, the article argues that India’s evolving jurisprudence particularly the de-indexing/erasure distinction crafted by the Delhi High Court offers a workable middle path, though one whose enforceability against mirror sites, foreign search engines, and unresolved hard cases remains untested. The article concludes with proposed criteria the nature of the offence, elapsed time, public-figure status, and continuing public interest that could inform a uniform national standard for adjudicating RTBF claims involving court records.
Keywords: Right to be Forgotten; Informational Privacy; Article 21; Open Justice; Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; De-Indexing.
- INTRODUCTION
The internet does not forget easily. A newspaper report published two decades ago, an FIR uploaded onto a police website, or a matrimonial dispute reproduced in a district court’s cause list can now be retrieved by a search engine within a fraction of a second, indefinitely, regardless of whether the underlying proceeding ended in conviction, acquittal, discharge, or quiet withdrawal. In an age when a prospective employer, a marriage broker, or a curious neighbour is only a search query away from a person’s entire litigation history, the gap between legal closure and social closure has widened considerably. The right to be forgotten (“RTBF”) responds to this gap. It asks whether an individual, having been exonerated by law or having simply moved on from an event of the past, may compel the removal, de-indexing, or masking of digital traces of that event.
India’s engagement with RTBF has been unusually compressed. What began as scattered single-judge orders permitting redaction of names in a handful of matrimonial and acquittal matters has, within roughly five years, become one of the most closely watched constitutional controversies before the Supreme Court of India one that pits Article 21’s guarantee of privacy and dignity against the equally foundational principle of open justice, and against the institutional interests of legal databases, search engines, and the press. The Delhi High Court’s judgment of 29 May 2026 in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v Union of India,[1] running to 144 pages, represents the most elaborate judicial attempt yet to reconcile these interests through a structured framework of de-indexing and masking.[2] Yet barely weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had stayed two other orders one against the Indian Express and one against Indian Kanoon that had gone further and directed removal of news reports and original court records altogether, signalling that the contours of RTBF in India remain very much unsettled.[3]
This article maps that doctrinal journey. Part II sets out the conceptual foundations of RTBF and distinguishes it from the cognate but broader remedies of erasure and masking. Part III traces its constitutional roots in the Supreme Court’s privacy jurisprudence and the latent standard of proportionality review that underlies it. Part IV examines the limited statutory erasure right under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”) and explains why it does not, by itself, resolve the judicial-records controversy. Part V surveys the case law chronologically, from the Madras High Court’s early redaction orders to the pending Supreme Court appeals, and draws out the doctrinal logic connecting them. Part VI situates the Indian experience against comparable developments in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Part VII isolates the central doctrinal tension privacy against open justice and Part VIII offers a critical assessment of the practical and normative gaps in the present framework, including the technological limits of de-indexing and the harder cases the existing criteria do not resolve, before Part IX proposes criteria for a uniform national standard.
A methodological note is in order. This article is a work of doctrinal legal research: it proceeds through constitutional, statutory, and case-law analysis, supported by comparative reference to foreign jurisdictions, rather than through empirical or quantitative methods. Because several of the developments discussed below particularly the 2025–2026 Supreme Court orders and the Delhi High Court’s Laksh Vir Singh Yadav judgment postdate their formal reporting in standard law reports, the article relies in places on contemporaneous case reporting by legal news services and practitioner commentary, cross-checked against primary sources (the DPDP Act, the GDPR, and reported precedent) wherever available. This is an unavoidable feature of writing on a rapidly evolving area of law rather than a substitute for primary authority, and the article’s central doctrinal claims rest throughout on the constitutional and statutory text itself.
[1]Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v Union of India & Connected Matters, Delhi High Court, Neutral Citation 2026:DHC:4891 (29 May 2026) (Datta J).
[2]‘Delhi High Court Recognises Right To Be Forgotten, Lays Down Framework For De-Indexing Judicial Records’ (LiveLaw, 8 June 2026) <https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/delhi-high-court/> accessed 1 August 2026.
[3]‘Supreme Court Stays Order Invoking the “Right to Be Forgotten” for Removal of News Reports & Judicial Records from the Public Domain’ (Internet Freedom Foundation, 2 March 2026) <https://internetfreedom.in/supreme-court-stays-order-invoking-the-right-to-be-forgotten-for-removal-of-news-reports-judicial-records-from-the-public-domain/> accessed 1 August 2026.