Right To Be Forgotten: I Called It Impossible in India. The Delhi High Court Proved Me Wrong.
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-07-11 15:01:46
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
In 2019, writing on the European right to be forgotten for The Statesman, I noted one plain fact. Whatever protection Mario Costeja Gonzalez had won in Spain, an Indian citizen had none. There was no forum, no framework, no recourse. Seven years later, the Delhi High Court has closed that gap. The right to be forgotten is now Indian law.
The court's ruling, delivered on May 29 in a batch of thirty petitions led by Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India, does what I said in 2019 no Indian court could do on its own. It reads the right to erasure into Article 21. It gives citizens a legal basis to ask for judgments, court orders and old news reports about them to be de-indexed or masked. This is not a small thing. It is the first time an Indian court has drawn a workable line between a citizen's privacy and the public's right to know.
But read past the headline and the old problem I flagged in 2019 is still sitting there, mostly unsolved.
De-indexing is not deletion. I wrote in 2019 that removing a search link does nothing to the document that generated it. The same document turns up the moment someone searches by different words, or on a different engine, or finds it mirrored on another site. The Delhi High Court's own order concedes this. De-indexing benefits the casual search. It does nothing to court archives, media mirrors or social media reposts. The court has essentially formalised the workaround I described in Mario's case: you can hide the front door, but the house is still standing.
The enforcement machinery does not exist yet. The ruling leans on Section 12 of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, for its statutory anchor. But the Data Protection Board that is supposed to administer erasure requests has not been notified. There is no functioning institution to receive a claim, weigh it against a newspaper's right to report or a litigant's right to a public trial, and enforce a decision. Until the Board exists, this right is a principle on paper, not a remedy a citizen can actually use.
Nobody has settled who decides. The court has proposed a tiered structure: platforms first, then the data protection board, then the courts for harder cases. This is sensible in theory. In practice it multiplies the number of gatekeepers a citizen must persuade before an old FIR or a settled criminal case stops surfacing next to their name. Every additional layer is a place the request can stall.
The masking order is a stopgap, not a settlement. The court has ordered a two-week window for petitioners' names to be redacted from digital databases while the larger legal architecture is built. That is triage, not resolution. It buys time. It does not answer what happens when the Supreme Court, which is now seized of the matter, takes a different view of where privacy ends and open justice begins.
None of this makes the ruling meaningless. It is the first time India has acknowledged, at the level of a High Court, that a citizen's digital footprint is not simply the internet's to keep forever. That is real progress from where things stood when I wrote about Mario Costeja Gonzalez's fight with Google. But the gap between having a right and being able to exercise one is exactly where India now stands. My 2019 piece asked whether Indian citizens would ever get the recourse Europeans had. The Delhi High Court has answered yes, in principle. It has not yet answered how.
Three things need to happen before this right means anything to an ordinary citizen. The Data Protection Board needs to be constituted and staffed without further delay. The tiered review process needs published timelines, not administrative discretion, so a request does not die of inaction. And the Supreme Court needs to resolve the tension between de-indexing and source deletion before High Courts across the country start ruling differently on the same question. Until then, the right to be forgotten in India is a door the Delhi High Court has unlocked. Nobody has yet built the room behind it.
