What the Court Ordered
On July 15, 2026, the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court directed its own Registry to anonymize a petitioner — an environment and climate-change consultant identified only as "ABC" — across all digital court records connected to a criminal case after his FIR was quashed. The bench of Justices Urmila Joshi-Phalke and Nivedita Mehta held, in ABC v. State of Maharashtra & Ors., that "no public interest" was served by keeping his alleged involvement in a now-dismissed case "alive on the internet," and that the right to privacy "incorporates the right to be forgotten" (Bar & Bench). LiveLaw's report frames the same order as a direction to mask the litigant's identity in online court records once the underlying proceeding no longer exists in law (LiveLaw).
The doctrinal anchor is Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017), where a nine-judge Supreme Court bench unanimously held that privacy is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 — explicitly grounding informational privacy in the same clause that guards liberty itself (Puttaswamy judgment, IndianKanoon). Nagpur's order is a direct descendant of that 2017 holding, extended from a general privacy principle to a specific claim: that a person cleared by the justice system shouldn't have to carry an indexed, searchable record of the accusation forever.
The Case for the Order
The strongest version of this argument doesn't need much dressing up. An FIR that is quashed is, in the eyes of the law, as if the allegation never resulted in criminal liability — yet a Google search of the petitioner's name would have surfaced it indefinitely, to any employer, landlord, or acquaintance who looked. Search engines and legal-database mirrors don't distinguish between "under investigation" and "cleared"; they just index whatever a court publishes. For someone whose profession depends on institutional trust — an environmental consultant working with agencies or clients who Google before signing a contract — a permanently public record of a quashed FIR is a standing penalty for a charge the state itself walked back. Courts extending Puttaswamy to this fact pattern are not inventing a new right so much as applying an old one to a new medium.
Why This Should Worry Anyone Who Cares About Open Records
The trouble is that India still has no statute that answers how this right should work, and that gap is exactly what makes the Nagpur order interesting rather than routine. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — passed by the Rajya Sabha on August 9, 2023 — deliberately recast the right to be forgotten as a narrower "right to correction and erasure" under Section 12, and, per PRS Legislative Research's bill tracker, the final Act removed the broader right to be forgotten that had appeared in earlier drafts, despite a Joint Parliamentary Committee recommendation to keep it (PRS India). Parliament, in other words, looked at this exact question and chose restraint — partly because Section 12's erasure right doesn't bind the state's own processing, and partly because a blanket erasure right sits awkwardly next to open-court and press-freedom norms.
Court records are not incidental data trails; they are the public record of how justice was administered, and open judicial records are what let journalists, researchers, and future litigants check that the system worked. A masking order issued by two Nagpur Bench judges, however sympathetic the facts, is not the same as a legislature working through where anonymization should stop: Should it apply only to quashed FIRs, or also to acquittals, withdrawn complaints, settled matrimonial disputes? Does it bind search-engine caches and legal databases that already mirrored the original record, or only the court's own Registry? None of that is settled, and each High Court bench answering it independently — on facts that vary case to case — produces exactly the patchwork of inconsistent precedent that a proportionate statute exists to avoid.
What Should Happen Instead
India doesn't need to choose between ignoring Puttaswamy and letting courts freelance a doctrine one masking order at a time. The DPDP Rules, still pending finalization, are the right vehicle to codify a narrow, bounded right — limited to quashed FIRs and acquittals, with clear carve-outs for ongoing public-interest reporting and legal-research databases, and a defined process rather than an ad hoc Registry direction. Until then, expect more Nagpur-style orders: sympathetic on the facts, doctrinally sound under Article 21, but each one a reminder that Parliament left this exact question on the table in 2023.