A few days ago, the Delhi High Court (“HC”) ordered Wikipedia to take down a page covering the ongoing case of Wikimedia v ANI (CS(OS) 524/2024). Earlier this year, Asian News International (“ANI”) filed a defamation suit against Wikimedia. ANI’s Wikipedia page mentioned allegations that ANI is a BJP mouthpiece, spreads misinformation, and engages in questionable journalism practices. For this, ANI took Wikimedia to court for civil defamation. The Wikipedia page ordered to be removed contained information about this ongoing litigation—a standard Wikipedia practice. The judges found this contemptuous. They reasoned that the very existence of this page prima facie violates, with impunity, the principle of sub-judice. Soon, the page was deleted.
The decision is as puzzling as it is insidious. Ordering the deletion of a webpage covering a case centred on free speech is an irony so thick that you could spread it on your toast. To start with, the order is wholly baseless. It also denudes us of the foundational constitutional principle of free speech and information. While the order may be criticised from various angles, I limit myself to a few first-principled rebuttals. First, reporting ongoing cases does not in itself amount to contempt of court. Second, even broadly reading the principle of sub-judice does not support the court’s findings. Third, the decision chills free speech and information. Finally, I offer my conclusions.
1. Contempt of Court
The Supreme Court(“SC”) has constantly and unambiguously upheld the reporting of court proceedings. In Swapnil Tripathi v Union of India, the court premised itself on the inference that the open court principle directly flows from §327 of CrPC and §153-B of CPC. This commitment to openness was further reinforced when the Election Commission attempted to curtail media reporting on judges’ oral remarks. Again, SC refused this relying on the principle of open court and the right to know of the citizens.
It is tempting to reproduce full paragraphs from these judgements to evince the tyranny of the present order. It suffices to say that the Contempt of Court Act 1971 makes abundantly clear that public literature on court proceedings is allowed. §4 reads that, subject to §7, “a person shall not be guilty of contempt of court for publishing a fair and accurate report of a judicial proceeding or any stage thereof.” §7 is not attracted here for that pertains to in-chambers or in-camera proceedings. The essence is clear: transparency is not just permitted—it is protected and sacrosanct. The rest is commentary.
2. The Sub-judice principle
The sub-judice principle aims to fend off interference with judicial proceedings. Evidently, the sub-judice principle emerged in an era predating mass communication and the internet. Its original purpose was to prevent direct interference with judicial proceedings, particularly in jury trials where public opinion could sway lay jurors. Presently in light of a judge-driven system, this historical justification should be read in a measured and pragmatic fashion—and the courts have done so historically. Certainly, publications can indeed interfere with justice in clear ways – for instance, by calling for physically harming a judge or inciting people to raid court premises during hearings. The wiki page in question, however, did none of these things. Instead, it served as a fairly unopinionated repository of information about the case. Moreover, even if the page had expressed opinions, it’s difficult to see how a standard internet publication about an ongoing case could meaningfully interfere with judicial proceedings. If we accept the current interpretation, we would have to conclude, rather absurdly, that any literature that reports, summarizes, or comments on an active case inherently interferes with the course of justice—including this blog post.
Courts have consistently interpreted sub-judice narrowly to maintain balance with press freedom. In Sahara India Real Estate Corp. Ltd. v. SEBI, the Supreme Court emphasized that any restriction on reporting must pass the “real and substantial risk of prejudice” test. The Re: Vijay Kurle judgment clarified that mere criticism or reporting of judicial proceedings does not constitute contempt. Indirect Tax Practitioners Association v. R.K. Jain established that fair criticism of judicial proceedings does not lower the authority of the court and is protected speech. This list goes on but is nothing more than a mild inconvenience for the judges here.
3. On Free Speech
There are umpteen instances where the order flies in the face of free-speech law. It muzzles the collective and individual voices of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors. It also excises the public’s right to know, as if transparency were a tumour to the body of democracy. The court offers no evidence of demonstrable harm from the wiki page’s documentation of proceedings. Nor does it attempt even a cursory proportionality analysis; of course because none could justify this despotic behaviour. Further, the order’s overbreadth is also striking: it doesn’t point to the specific harmful aspects of the documentation but rather condemns the entire documentation enterprise as contemptuous per se.
Perhaps most troubling is the order’s mechanistic precision in violating established free speech principles. If there would be a checklist of “how not to protect constitutional rights,” the order would come out with flying colours—meticulously ticking off each violation with an efficiency only rivalled by bloodless and unimaginative bots.
The order also betrays stunning myopia about Wikipedia’s role as a digital archive. In an era where legal news increasingly lives online, such archiving serves beyond legal purpose and becomes an ingredient in common understanding, education and historicising. By treating such work as contemptuous, the court effectively leads us to a hygienic way of history making—one that is written after the fact, sanitized by time and distance.
4. Conclusion
The futility of repeatedly defending established legal principles is wearing. Like explaining why water is wet or why the sky is blue; as noted by Bhatia earlier—there are only so many ways to argue that judges should respect fundamental constitutional guarantees and set precedent. Yet, here we are—watching as a court order brazenly disregards decades of jurisprudence on free speech, open courts, and press freedom. The order would be comedic if it weren’t so deeply troubling for our democracy.
The order represents more than just flawed legal reasoning—it signals a growing comfort with restricting digital information flows under increasingly tenuous pretexts. When courts begin treating basic documentation of their own proceedings as contemptuous, they not only undermine their own legitimacy but also chip away at the foundation of an informed citizenry.
As we witness such orders, the task of defending obvious constitutional principles may seem mundane. But perhaps that very mundanity—the need to repeatedly state what should be self-evident—is itself evidence of how we’ve totally gambled away our constitutional principles.
Samriddh Sharma Samriddh
Samriddh Sharma Samriddh is an undergraduate law student at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. He is interested in critical legal studies and law & tech.
