Senior Advocate Shadan Farasat, responding to a question by The Editor of The Hindu, Suresh Nambath, said, “I don’t think there is any right to have sanitised history.” If someone is being charged in court of law, and then discharged, both will be in the public domain.
“News organisations are often flooded with requests for deletion of content, merely because someone who has been accused of and arrested for a heinous crime has since been acquitted,” said Mr. Nambath, asking, “We provide context to the arrest, but most of these people want their content to be deleted. So, how do you deal with a situation like that?”
“If there is a right to be forgotten, there needs to be limitations,” he said.
Both versions are there (in the public domain), fact plays out as it plays out. It can’t be that everything can be asked to be removed in an attempt to sanitise history, he said.
“We have very clear principles in our constitution, Article 19(2), saying that they can regulate speech only to a certain degree as reasonable, and it has to ensure that you are not in any way infringing on certain discrimination, you are not inciting violence, it’s not slanderous, libellous, or vicious. Those are brought here for public order,” said Gopal Sankaranarayanan.
– Suruchi Kumari
