Bombay HC Nagpur Bench Orders Masking of Petitioner's Name from Digital Court Records After FIR Quashing

A Division Bench at Bombay HC's Nagpur Bench directed the Registry to replace the petitioner's name with “ABC” across all digital court records, invoking the right to be forgotten under Article 21.

More than seven years after a First Information Report against him was quashed by a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court, a petitioner found his name still prominently accessible online — surfacing in professional and educational background checks, prejudicing his career and causing, as the court recorded, “profound social stigma to his family and minor daughter.” On 3 July 2026, a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court at its Nagpur Bench, comprising Justice Urmila Joshi-Phalke and Justice Nivedita P. Mehta, allowed Criminal Writ Petition No. 470 of 2026 and directed the Registry to mask the petitioner's name across all digital versions of three sets of proceedings, replacing it with the anonymised label “ABC”. The bench grounded its decision in the constitutional right to privacy under Article 21, treating the right to be forgotten as an integral part of that guarantee.

The Dispute Before the Nagpur Bench

FIR No. 144/2017 was registered on 5 October 2017 against the petitioner at Police Station Bajaj Nagar, Nagpur. He was an Environment and Climate Change Consultant, resident of Jaipur. He sought anticipatory bail and was protected by the court during the investigation. The parties subsequently reached an amicable settlement, and a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court allowed Criminal Application (APL) No. 802/2017, quashing FIR No. 144/2017 and all subsequent proceedings.

Despite that complete legal exoneration, the court records — including the judgment and orders dated 27 November 2018 in Criminal Application (APL) No. 802/2017 and Criminal M.A. No. 2593/2017 — remained publicly accessible on the High Court's website and indexed by external search engines. The petitioner's name appeared in cause titles, pleadings, citations, and orders, all of which were retrievable through routine internet searches. The petitioner approached the Nagpur Bench seeking directions to the Registrar General to mask and anonymise his name and personal identifiers in the digital versions of those proceedings, and to delink those records from search engine indexability.

The Legal Issue

The core question was whether a person fully exonerated through the quashing of an FIR retains a constitutionally protected interest in having his name removed from publicly accessible digital court records, even where those records are accurate and not fabricated.

Counsel for the petitioner, Mr. S.B. Tiwari, pressed a specific and pointed argument: the right to protect one's reputation must exist not only against falsehood but also, in appropriate circumstances, against certain truths. He relied on the Bombay High Court's earlier decision in Writ Petition No. 3499/2021, in which the Principal Seat at Mumbai had examined the right to be forgotten in the context of delinking a judgment from a court website. He submitted that the same reasoning applied here.

The Additional Public Prosecutor, Mr. V.A. Thakare, opposed the petition but conceded that the right to privacy itself was not in dispute, leaving the court to determine whether the specific relief sought — digital masking and search engine delinking — was warranted on these facts.

How the Bench Reasoned

The Division Bench accepted that the right to privacy is a fundamental right forming an intrinsic part of Article 21 of the Constitution. It held that the concept of right to privacy incorporates the right to be forgotten. The bench stated that when criminal proceedings against a person are quashed, the algorithmic persistence of those records online serves no public interest and conflicts with basic notions of proportionality and fairness.

The bench drew on the Bombay High Court's own earlier analysis in Writ Petition No. 3499/2021. In that matter, the Principal Seat had noted that the petitioner's prayer was specifically limited to the availability of case details and the judgment on the court system's website — a publicly accessible resource — and did not extend to the destruction of court records. The Nagpur Bench treated that distinction as significant: the petitioner was not seeking to erase the judicial record itself but only to prevent his name from being surfaced through digital access points.

The bench also referred to the Delhi High Court's observations in ABC v. State of Another, 2024 SCC OnLine Del 8113, which had similarly affirmed that the right to privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21. Additionally, the bench invoked KS Puttaswamy II, in which the Supreme Court had recognised that privacy safeguards individual autonomy and the ability to control vital aspects of one's life.

On the question of balancing the right to information against individual privacy, the bench held that once no criminal proceedings remain pending and the dispute has been amicably resolved, no continuing public interest justifies keeping the information alive in an indexed and searchable form online. The right to information, it observed, cannot be divorced from the need to balance it against the individual's right to privacy.

The petitioner's counsel had also pointed out that the unredacted digital records were surfacing during professional and educational background checks, directly affecting the petitioner's career progression over seven years after his exoneration. The bench recorded this prejudice and treated it as material to allowing the petition.

Scope of the Direction

The bench was careful to confine its directions to the digital public-facing records. The relief did not extend to the physical case records or to destroying any judicial document. The specific proceedings covered by the directions were:

• Criminal M.A. No. 2593/2017
• Criminal Application (APL) No. 802/2017
• Criminal Writ Petition No. 470/2026 (the present petition)

Across all three, the Registry was directed to remove the petitioner's name from the records and their search results. Going forward, the petitioner's name is to be shown in cause titles, pleadings, citations, judgments, and orders across those cases as “ABC” rather than by his actual name.

Order

The Division Bench allowed Criminal Writ Petition No. 470 of 2026 and made the Rule absolute. The Registry of the Bombay High Court was directed to remove the petitioner's name from the records of Criminal M.A. No. 2593/2017, Criminal Application (APL) No. 802/2017, and Criminal Writ Petition No. 470/2026, including their search results, and to substitute the label “ABC” in all digital references to the petitioner in those matters. The judgment was delivered on 3 July 2026 by Justice Urmila Joshi-Phalke, with concurrence by Justice Nivedita P. Mehta.