1. Introduction:

The right to life under Article 21 does not merely guarantee the bare existence of life; over time, the Supreme Court has understood it to include conditions necessary for its meaningful enjoyment. Thus, in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, the Court recognised that the right to life includes “the right of enjoyment of pollution free water and air for full enjoyment of life.” The Court did not create a separate and freestanding “right to water”; rather, it recognised that where the quality of water is so degraded that it affects the enjoyment of life, the constitutional guarantee of life would be rendered incomplete by treating mere access to water as sufficient. The subsequent jurisprudence on access to clean drinking water similarly reflects the proposition that a constitutional entitlement may carry within it a qualitative dimension: it is not merely the right to have water, but the right to have water of a quality compatible with the enjoyment of life.

The same distinction may be drawn in relation to information. Constitutional jurisprudence has long recognised that Article 19(1)(a) encompasses a right to know and a right to receive information. But if the purpose of that right is to enable individuals to form opinions, participate in public affairs and meaningfully exercise their democratic freedoms, can the constitutional guarantee be understood as being satisfied by information merely because it has been made available? Or does the right to receive information necessarily carry some qualitative dimension—a right to receive information that is not materially false, misleading, distorted or stripped of the context necessary to understand its meaning?

The Supreme Court itself came close to articulating this concern in Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal,. While explaining the relationship between democracy and the right to be informed, the Court observed:

“82. …True democracy cannot exist unless all citizens have a right to participate in the affairs of the polity of the country. The right to participate in the affairs of the country is meaningless unless the citizens are well informed on all sides of the issues, in respect of which they are called upon to express their views. One-sided information, disinformation, misinformation and non-information all equally create an uninformed citizenry which makes democracy a farce when medium of information is monopolised either by a partisan central authority or by private individuals or oligarchic organisations. This is particularly so in a country like ours where about 65 per cent of the population is illiterate and hardly 1-1/2 per cent of the population has an access to the print media which is not subject to pre-censorship. When, therefore, the electronic media is controlled by one central agency or few private agencies of the rich, there is a need to have a central agency, as stated earlier, representing all sections of the society. Hence to have a representative central agency to ensure the viewers’ right to be informed adequately and truthfully is a part of the right of the viewers under Article 19(1)(a)….”

This observation raises a question that is more fundamental than the mere existence of a right to know. If there is a constitutional right to receive information, is there correspondingly a constitutional right to receive information that is not materially misleading? Is there a right to receive misinformation or to have information presented in a manner that, although technically based on true words or events, produces a materially false or distorted understanding? Conversely, if misinformation undermines the very purpose of an informed citizenry, can the constitutional right to receive information be understood as containing a limited right against informational distortion?

The distinction may be expressed through the analogy of clean water. The constitutional concern in the case of water is not exhausted by asking whether water is available; the quality of that water determines whether its availability meaningfully serves the right it is intended to support. Similarly, the constitutional concern with information may not be exhausted by asking whether information has been disseminated. The quality in which information reaches the citizen may matter as much as its availability. Information that is materially false, selectively presented, deprived of essential context, or distorted through sensationalisation may formally satisfy a right of access while defeating the democratic purpose for which the right to know exists.

This does not, however, mean that every error, omission, editorial choice or disagreement over interpretation constitutes a constitutional wrong. Unlike contaminated water, which may often be measured against identifiable physical or scientific standards, informational “contamination” is frequently dependent upon context, interpretation and competing accounts of an event. The challenge, therefore, is to determine whether a meaningful constitutional standard can be developed without converting the State, the courts, or any other institutional actor into an arbiter of what constitutes “truth”.

This article examines whether Indian constitutional law already contains the foundations of such a principle, and whether those foundations can legitimately be described as a “Right to Clean Information.” It traces the jurisprudence on the right to know under Article 19(1)(a), the relationship between information and Article 21, the constitutional commitment to open justice and live-streaming of court proceedings, the limited mechanisms through which Indian law addresses prejudicial or distorted reporting, and the emerging debate surrounding the decontextualisation of judicial observations. The recent controversy surrounding the “cockroach” remark of CJI Surya Kant provides a particularly useful case study: the words spoken in court, the context in which they were spoken, and the manner in which they subsequently entered public discourse demonstrate how information can be factually reproduced yet materially altered in meaning through the loss of context.

The argument advanced here is not that Indian law has already recognised a freestanding right to truthful or “clean” information. It has not. Rather, the existing jurisprudence suggests a more precise and narrower proposition: the constitutional right to know may carry a legitimate concern with the integrity of the information through which citizens are expected to exercise that right. Whether that concern can mature into an enforceable constitutional right and, if so, what its limits should be—is the question this article seeks to explore.

Part I -The Existing Foundation: Article 19(1)(a) and the ‘Right to Know’

The starting point of any “right to information” analysis in Indian law is State of U.P. v. Raj Narain, where Justice K.K. Mathew held: “In a government of responsibility like ours, where all the agents of the public must be responsible for their conduct, there can be but few secrets. The people of this country have a right to know every public act, everything that is done in a public way, by their public functionaries.” This “right to know” was tied expressly to Article 19(1)(a) and was carried forward in S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (the Judges’ Transfer case), where Justice P.N. Bhagwati held that open government is a “direct emanation” from the right to know implicit in freedom of speech and expression.

The Court extended the same logic to the broadcast media in Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal, holding that airwaves are public property and that the right to impart and receive information through the electronic media is part of Article 19(1)(a). The most consequential application, however, came in the electoral context. In Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms (2002), the Court held that a voter’s right to know the criminal, financial and educational antecedents of a candidate is part of Article 19(1)(a)  reasoning, memorably, that “if right to telecast and right to view sport games… is considered to be part and parcel of Article 19(1)(a), we fail to understand why the right of a citizen/voter… to know about the antecedents of his candidate cannot be held to be a fundamental right.” When Parliament tried to legislatively reverse this outcome through Section 33B of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, the Court struck the provision down in PUCL v. Union of India (2003), holding that the right to information, once recognised, “is a dynamic right that should be allowed to grow.”

Most recently, in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India (2024) the Electoral Bonds case a five-judge bench led by CJI D.Y. Chandrachud struck down the anonymous political-funding scheme, again grounding the decision in the voter’s Article 19(1)(a) right to information necessary for informed political choice.

What this fifty-year line of cases establishes is a right to receive information access, disclosure, transparency. None of these cases, on their own terms, address the qualitatively distinct question of whether information, once received, must also be accurate and undistorted. That question surfaces only at the margins in privacy law, in open-justice law, and, as Part III shows, in one very direct and very recent piece of litigation.

3. Part II — Article 21, Truth, and the Boundary with Privacy: R. Rajagopal

In R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (the ‘Auto Shankar’ case), the Supreme Court dealt with a magazine’s attempt to publish the autobiography of a condemned prisoner, which the State sought to restrain on the ground that it was defamatory of prison officials. Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy held that the State could not impose prior restraint on the ground that the material might be false or defamatory; the remedy for inaccuracy lay in a post-publication action for damages, not in advance censorship. The case is usually read (correctly) as a privacy precedent, but it is equally a precedent on the timing of any right to accurate information: Indian constitutional law’s answer to “what if the information is wrong” is a subsequent remedy, not a prior filter. This has direct bearing on any “right to clean information” doctrine it suggests that if such a right exists at all, it is far more likely to operate as an after-the-fact accountability mechanism (correction, retraction, damages) than as a prior-restraint or fact-checking power. That distinction becomes central in Part III.

Part III – The Union of India Already Made This Argument, and Lost: Kunal Kamra v. Union of India

The closest India has come to formal recognition (or rejection) of a “right to clean information” is the litigation over the 2023 amendment to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which empowered a government-run Fact Check Unit (FCU) to flag online content about “the business of the Central Government” as “fake, false or misleading” and compel its removal. In its affidavit defending the Rule, the Union government argued, under the heading “citizens’ right to know about the functioning of business, right to know accurate and true information, be protected and shielded from fake and untrue information,” that a “fundamental right to accurate information” is implicit in Article 19(1)(a). This is, in substance, the Right to Clean Information argument advanced not by a civil-liberties petitioner seeking protection from distortion, but by the State, to justify a takedown power over content it characterised as contaminated.

Senior counsel Navroz Seervai, for Kamra, rejected the premise outright: “That’s nowhere to be found. So, they are misreading 19(1)(a) completely and this is contrary to the assertions ever made or ever accepted by any judgment since 1950.” He relied on Kaushal Kishor v. State of U.P. (discussed in Part IX below) for the proposition that Article 19(2) is a closed list of permissible restrictions, and argued that the Union had impermissibly conflated “the State” with “the government of the day” in claiming an interest in policing its own coverage. Justice G.S. Patel of the Bombay High Court agreed with the petitioners, holding the FCU provision unconstitutional as violative of Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g) vague, overbroad, and productive of a chilling effect that incentivised platform self-censorship rather than accurate correction. The matter is now on appeal, with a three-judge Supreme Court bench led by CJI Surya Kant the same CJI at the centre of the cockroach controversy having agreed in 2026 to hear the Union’s challenge, while declining to stay the High Court’s order in the interim.

Part IV Open Justice: The Public’s Right to Know What Actually Transpired in Court

The open-justice principle predates any Indian right-to-information jurisprudence and rests on the same instinct Jeremy Bentham captured for the common law tradition generally: “In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape have full swing… Publicity is the very soul of justice.”  The Indian line begins with Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v. State of Maharashtra, which held that open trial is the constitutional norm, subject to narrow in-camera exceptions, and that journalists have an Article 19 right to publish what transpires in open court.

4.1 Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India (2018)

A three-judge bench led by CJI Dipak Misra held that live-streaming of Supreme Court proceedings is a constitutional imperative flowing from the right to access justice under Article 21 and the right to know under Article 19(1)(a), and grounded the open-court principle in Article 145(4)’s requirement that judgments be pronounced in open court. Critically, the Court identified reducing the public’s dependence on “potentially inaccurate secondary reports” that is, on journalism and hearsay as one of live-streaming’s specific constitutional benefits. In other words, Swapnil Tripathi already frames open justice partly as a remedy for informational contamination the idea being that direct, unmediated access to proceedings is itself a form of ‘clean’ information, superior to filtered second hand reporting.

4.2 Chief Election Commissioner of India v. M.R. Vijayabhaskar

When the Election Commission sought to restrain the media from reporting oral observations made by the Madras High Court during the COVID-19 second wave, the Supreme Court dismissed the plea as “far-fetched,” holding that the media should be able to report everything transpiring in the courtroom, including oral observations, as a matter of accountability and public trust-building. This is the key counterweight to any ‘clean information’ doctrine framed as a licence to restrict reporting of oral remarks: the Supreme Court has already, and directly, rejected the argument that oral observations should not be reported at all. Any protocol along the lines the CJI has since proposed (Part VI.3) would have to be reconciled with this precedent, which treats the reporting of oral exchanges unfiltered as itself a facet of the public’s right to know, not a threat to it.

4.3 Fakir Mamad Suleman Sameja v. Adani Ports — the ‘transparency gap’

A recent controversy sharpens the tension. On 27 January 2026, a bench dictated an order in open court, live-streamed on YouTube, that appeared to include a status quo direction protecting certain land and to keep a pending PIL alive. The signed order, uploaded weeks later, omitted the status-quo direction and disposed of the PIL. When affected respondents challenged the discrepancy, the Supreme Court held the digitally signed order is the only final and binding expression of the Court’s decision, and that open-court dictation is merely “the skeletal framework” for the order a memory aid, not a legal act imposing costs on the applicants for what it called an abuse of process.

As the Bar & Bench analysis of the ruling observes, this creates an unresolved doctrinal tension with Swapnil Tripathi: if live-streaming exists so the public can watch proceedings unfold, but what unfolds is legally provisional and non-binding, then “the public is not watching the Court deliver justice in real time. It is watching the Court produce a preliminary record, which may or may not resemble the operative order that emerges from chambers two weeks later.” This is, in effect, a structural (rather than a media-behaviour) source of ‘contaminated’ information the public forms a settled understanding of what a court has decided from something the Court itself later disowns as a draft. A ‘right to clean information’ framework, if it is to be more than a rule about press conduct, would have to grapple with this institutional source of distortion as much as with any journalist’s or commentator’s.

Part V – The Countervailing Doctrine: Contempt, Sub Judice, and the Postponement Device

Indian law already has a mechanism for protecting the integrity of information about pending proceedings: the law of contempt, refined in Sahara India Real Estate Corp. Ltd. v. SEBI (2012). A Constitution Bench held that courts of record (under Articles 129 and 215) may, in appropriate cases, order a temporary postponement of publication where there is a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice applying tests of necessity, proportionality and temporariness, and expressly drawing on the European Court of Human Rights’ balancing approach in Sunday Times v. United Kingdom. The Court declined to lay down blanket guidelines for the press, insisting instead on a case-by-case, content-and-context test a deliberate refusal to create a generalised ‘accuracy’ filter on reporting, in favour of a narrowly tailored, temporary and reviewable remedy confined to the risk of prejudicing a specific pending case.

Part VI – Case Study: The CJI Surya Kant ‘Cockroach’ Remark

6.1 The Remark, Its Context and Its Aftermath

On 15 May 2026, a Bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was hearing a plea concerning delay by the Delhi High Court in conferring Senior Advocate designation. Finding the petition frivolous, the CJI made the following oral observations (as reported verbatim): “There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them? There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone…”  

The remark subsequently circulated widely on social media, with portions of the exchange being understood as a criticism of unemployed youth generally. A satirical movement, the “Cockroach Janta Party”, emerged in response and attracted substantial public attention. The episode illustrates how an oral observation made in a particular procedural and factual context may acquire a substantially different meaning when reduced to an isolated clip or quotation. 

The CJI clarified on 16 May 2026 that the remark was directed at persons entering the legal profession through forged degrees and was not intended as a characterisation of unemployed youth generally The episode therefore presents the central problem addressed in this article: information may reproduce the words actually spoken and yet convey a materially different impression when the context qualifying those words is omitted.

6.2 The Proposed Reporting Protocol and the Constitutional Tension

 

In an interview with Bar & Bench on 24 July 2026, the CJI subsequently argued that “mentionings” seeking urgent listing are administrative or semi-administrative exercises rather than adjudications on the merits. He called for a formal protocol under which the media would either receive appropriate official briefings regarding such exchanges or refrain from reporting certain administrative observations. He specifically cautioned that selective reporting of isolated oral observations without context could mislead the public and undermine confidence in the judiciary.

The proposal, however, raises a constitutional tension with Chief Election Commissioner of India v. M.R. Vijayabhaskar, where the Supreme Court held that the media could not be prevented from reporting oral observations made during judicial proceedings. Any binding restriction on such reporting would therefore have to be carefully reconciled with the constitutional protection of freedom of speech and expression and the principle that Article 19(2) constitutes the permissible grounds for restricting it.

The issue is consequently not whether oral observations should be insulated from public reporting, but whether the constitutional right of the public to know what transpires in court carries a corresponding interest in receiving that information in a manner that does not materially distort its context.

6.3 Decontextualisation as an Institutional and Informational Problem 

The controversy also prompted a separate PIL concerning the commercial exploitation and monetisation of oral judicial observations, in which the Supreme Court issued notice to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Bar Council of India. The proceedings raise a related question concerning the use of judicial speech outside its original context, although they do not, at this stage, establish any constitutional right to accurate information  

More broadly, concerns regarding decontextualised reporting have been expressed by members of the higher judiciary on earlier occasions Then-CJI N.V. Ramana told the Supreme Court Bar Association on Constitution Day: “I cannot speak without paper unlike the SG. If I say anything offhand, my media friends here interpret it differently,” and separately warned publicly against the “mixing of views with factual reporting,” cautioning that “in the race for ratings, the important journalistic tenet of verification before publishing is not being followed,” amplified within seconds by social media once published. In September 2024, Karnataka High Court Justice V. Srishananda expressed regret after clips of him referring to a Muslim-majority Bengaluru locality as ‘Pakistan’ went viral, stating that “a few observations made during judicial proceedings were reported out of context on social media platforms.” And in December 2024, Allahabad High Court Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav offered the same explanation that his remarks at a VHP function had been “reported out of context” to the Supreme Court Collegium, which was reported as unconvinced.  

The pattern is instructive: ‘taken out of context’ is invoked across a wide spectrum of cases, from remarks that plausibly were mischaracterised (the cockroach case, on the CJI’s own account) to remarks whose core content is not seriously disputed and where ‘context’ functions more as mitigation than as a factual correction. Any ‘right to clean information’ doctrine drawing on this pattern would need a workable test for distinguishing the two, since a right that simply credits every judicial claim of decontextualization would function as an unreviewable shield.

Part VII – Comparative and International Jurisprudence

8.1 The ‘right to truth’ in international human rights law

International law recognises a distinct, if narrow, ‘right to truth’ in the context of gross human rights violations, most developed in relation to enforced disappearances. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance enshrines a victim’s right to know the truth regarding the circumstances of a disappearance, and the UN General Assembly has proclaimed 24 March as the International Day for the Right to the Truth. Scholars, however, describe the right as “elusive” in transitional human-rights jurisprudence its legal status uncertain, its treaty basis thin outside the disappearances context, and its content inconsistently applied by the European and Inter-American human rights courts. This is instructive by analogy: even where international law has expressly named a ‘right to truth,’ it remains narrowly scoped (victims of specific atrocities, seeking specific facts about specific events) rather than a general entitlement against public informational distortion. A ‘right to clean information’ modelled on this precedent would likely need similarly narrow scoping to be workable for instance, confined to specific categories of high-stakes public communication (election information, court proceedings, public health) rather than framed as a general right against media distortion.

8.2 The fair-and-accurate-report privilege (England, USA)

Common-law jurisdictions have long protected reporting of court proceedings through the fair report privilege, which is instructive because it builds an accuracy standard directly into the legal protection for reporting. Under Section 14 of the UK Defamation Act 1996 (as amended in 2013), a fair and accurate report of public judicial proceedings, published contemporaneously, is absolutely privileged against a defamation claim but the privilege is conditional precisely on fairness and accuracy; a report that omits context in a way that changes the “gist” of what was said loses the privilege. American case law applies a similar principle: in Maple Lanes, Inc. v. News Media Corp., an Illinois court refused to extend the privilege to a report that quoted a sheriff as saying police were “targeting businesses” when he had actually said police were targeting “businesses whose employees” were involved in drug sales because the altered quotation changed the story’s gist, even though every individual word was accurate. This is directly on point for the cockroach controversy: the actual words used (“youngsters like cockroaches… don’t get any employment”) were, on the CJI’s account, accurately quoted by at least some outlets, yet the surrounding qualification (that the remark targeted fraudulent-degree holders specifically) was widely dropped precisely the kind of gist-altering omission the fair report privilege doctrine was built to police. India has no directly equivalent statutory privilege, but its absence of one is itself notable: Indian defamation law has not developed a specialised, accuracy-conditioned privilege for court reporting, leaving the field to the blunter instruments of contempt and general defamation law.

8.3 State-run fact-checking as a comparative caution

The clearest comparative lesson, however, may be a cautionary one, and it comes from within the Kunal Kamra litigation itself (Part III): the most concrete recent attempt anywhere to institutionalise a state-backed ‘right to accurate information’ the FCU was struck down as unconstitutional precisely because a government-run arbiter of truth about its own conduct is structurally compromised, vague in its ‘fake, false or misleading’ standard, and productive of a chilling effect disproportionate to the harm of misinformation itself. This mirrors global debate over the EU’s Digital Services Act and national fact-checking mandates, where the recurring objection is not that misinformation is harmless, but that empowering any single institutional arbiter government or platform to certify ‘clean’ information creates a censorship risk that can exceed the harm it addresses.

Part VIII – Structural Objections to a Freestanding ‘Right to Clean Information’

8.1 Article 19(2) is a closed list

The most serious doctrinal obstacle is Kaushal Kishor v. State of U.P. (2023), where a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously held that the grounds for restricting free speech under Article 19(2) are exhaustive, and that “under the guise of invoking other fundamental rights, additional restrictions, over and above those prescribed in Article 19(2), cannot be imposed upon the exercise of the right to freedom of speech and expression.” This matters directly for any legally binding ‘right to clean information’: if such a right were used, as the Union tried to use it in the FCU case, to justify restricting someone else’s speech (e.g., mandating takedowns of ‘distorted’ reporting) on a ground not found in Article 19(2) defamation, contempt of court, decency, public order, sovereignty and integrity, security of the State, incitement, and relations with foreign states are the only listed grounds Kaushal Kishor would appear to bar it, absent a fresh Constitution Bench willing to carve out an exception (as the Court has occasionally done for privacy, most notably in K.S. Puttaswamy, which was itself a similarly ‘unenumerated’ right read into Article 21). A right against informational contamination, in other words, would most plausibly have to be built as an Article 21 right (like privacy) rather than as a new restriction ground under Article 19(2), and even then would face the objection that Article 21 rights cannot ordinarily be invoked to override another citizen’s Article 19(1)(a) rights without an Article 19(2) hook exactly the reasoning Kaushal Kishor applied to reject using Article 21 dignity to restrict a minister’s Article 19(1)(a) speech.

8.2 Who decides what is ‘clean’?

The FCU litigation is the clearest illustration of the second objection: any legal mechanism for certifying information as accurate needs an arbiter, and every plausible arbiter carries its own risk of bias government (as in the struck-down FCU), courts (which the CJI’s proposed protocol would effectively make the arbiter of how their own oral remarks are reported), or private fact-checking bodies (which face their own capture and viewpoint-bias critiques globally). This is not a reason to dismiss the underlying problem of distortion as unreal, but it is the reason Indian courts have so far preferred narrow, judicially supervised remedies (postponement orders under Sahara, post-publication defamation and contempt actions, Rajagopal-style subsequent-remedy structures) over any general power to certify ‘clean’ versus ‘contaminated’ speech.

8.3 Where the water analogy breaks down

The structural limit of the clean-water analogy is that water contamination is, for legal purposes, an objectively measurable state a pollutant is present above a defined threshold or it is not, as Subhash Kumar itself illustrates: the Court dismissed the petition because the petitioner could not substantiate, on the facts, that pollution above lawful limits was actually occurring. Information ‘contamination,’ by contrast, is frequently a matter of interpretation, emphasis and editorial judgment rather than binary factual accuracy the cockroach remark was, on the available record, quoted with substantially correct words; the dispute is about which context was foregrounded and which was dropped, a judgment call much closer to the fair-report-privilege ‘gist’ test (Part VIII.2) than to a chemical assay. A legal right modelled too literally on the water analogy risks either (a) being so narrowly defined (verbatim misquotation only) that it does little work beyond existing defamation law, or (b) being defined broadly enough to reach ‘selective emphasis’ and thereby handing whoever administers it a de facto power to police editorial judgment the precise vice that doomed the FCU.

Part IX – Where the Doctrine Could Go: Threads Already Available

Although no Indian court has adopted a freestanding ‘right to clean information,’ the following elements already exist and could, in principle, be woven into a coherent framework without requiring wholesale doctrinal innovation:

(a) A narrow, court-supervised postponement power for reporting that risks concrete prejudice, already recognised in Sahara, could in principle be extended (with real constitutional strain, given Vijayabhaskar) to a very narrow category of oral ‘mentionings’ the CJI has flagged  though this would require distinguishing, not overruling, Vijayabhaskar.

(b) Post-publication accountability, consistent with R. Rajagopal‘s preference for subsequent remedies over prior restraint an accuracy-conditioned privilege for court reporting (India’s equivalent of the UK’s Section 14 fair-report privilege) would strengthen incentives for careful reporting without creating a takedown power, and is a legislative rather than judicial project.

(c) Institutional transparency measures, such as official briefings or a published note contextualising significant oral observations (the CJI’s own suggested alternative to a reporting ban), which would address the problem at its source without engaging Article 19(2) at all, since it does not restrict anyone’s speech — it only supplements the public record.

(d) Resolving the Fakir Mamad transparency gap, by clarifying as the Bar & Bench commentary urges what constitutional work live-streaming is actually doing if the streamed proceeding is legally provisional; a clearer public disclaimer distinguishing dictated draft orders from signed final orders would reduce a structural, non-media source of misinformation.

(e) A cautious, narrowly-scoped statutory intervention on the model of the international ‘right to truth,’ confined to specific high-stakes categories (for instance, election-related disclosures, where the Article 19(1)(a) right to know is already firmly established) rather than a general-purpose right against media distortion, would be more likely to survive the objections in Part IX than a generalised ‘right to clean information.’

Conclusion

Indian constitutional law has, for fifty years, developed a robust and still-expanding right to receive information under Article 19(1)(a) and Article 21 from Raj Narain through the Electoral Bonds judgment. It has separately developed an equally robust open-justice and live-streaming jurisprudence aimed at giving the public direct, unmediated access to what courts actually do. And it has, through the law of contempt and the (Rajagopal-derived) preference for post-publication remedies, developed narrow tools for addressing informational harm without prior restraint. What it has not developed and what the Union of India tried and failed to establish in the FCU litigation is a freestanding right that information, once lawfully received, must also be accurate, complete and undistorted. The clean-water analogy is intuitively powerful, but the 2024–2026 record suggests Indian courts view a State-administered or judicially-administered ‘purity’ standard for public discourse with real suspicion, precisely because (unlike a water sample) information cannot be tested for contamination without someone first being empowered to decide what counts as pure and that power has, so far, looked more dangerous to the courts than the distortion it would correct. The CJI Surya Kant episode may yet produce doctrine the pending PIL on commercial exploitation of oral observations is the vehicle most likely to do so but on the present state of authority, the ‘right to clean information’ remains a compelling normative argument in search of a constitutional home, not yet a right the Supreme Court has recognised.

Refrences – 

[1] Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 SCC 598 : AIR 1991 SC 420.

[2] A.P. Pollution Control Board II v. Prof. M.V. Nayudu, (2001) 2 SCC 62.

[3] Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal, (1995) 2 SCC 161, para 82.

[4] State of U.P. v. Raj Narain, (1975) 4 SCC 428. See also LiveLaw, “Supreme Court Judgments on RTI Act, 2005: Wither Transparency”, available at: https://www.livelaw.in/supreme-court-judgments-on-rti-act-2005-wither-transparency.

[5] S.P. Gupta v. Union of India, AIR 1982 SC 149. See also “RTI & Indian Constitution: Fundamental Right to Information”, available at: https://journalism.university/development-journalism-for-social-change/rti-indian-constitution-fundamental-right-information/.

[6] Secretary, Ministry of I&B, Government of India v. Cricket Association of Bengal, (1995) 2 SCC 161.

[7] Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms, (2002) 5 SCC 294. See also Bar & Bench, “The Voter’s Right to Know: Obligation to Disclose under the Amended Form 26”, available at: https://www.barandbench.com/columns/the-voters-right-to-know-obligation-to-disclose-under-the-amended-form-26.

[8] People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) v. Union of India, (2003) 4 SCC 399. See also Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, case analysis, available at: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/peoples-union-of-civil-liberties-pucl-v-union-of-india/.

[9] Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 113. See also case summary, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Democratic_Reforms_v._Union_of_India.

[10] R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1994) 6 SCC 632. See also Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, case analysis, available at: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/r-rajagopal-v-state-of-t-n/; full judgment available at: https://digiscr.sci.gov.in/admin/judgement_file/judgement_pdf/1994/Supp.%20(4)/Part%20I/S_1994_353-377_1702288271.pdf.

[11] Kunal Kamra v. Union of India, W.P. (L) No. 9792 of 2023 (Bom.). See also Supreme Court Observer, “Challenge to the IT Rules, 2023”, available at: https://www.scobserver.in/cases/challenge-to-the-it-rules-2023/; see also case summary, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunal_Kamra_v._Union_of_India.

[12] Medianama, “FCU Hearing: Kunal Kamra Challenges Right to Accurate Info”, 2 May 2024, available at: https://www.medianama.com/2024/05/223-fcu-hearing-kunal-kamra-challenges-right-accurate-info/.

[13] Ibid.

[14] See LiveLaw, “Bombay High Court Fact Check Unit: IT Rules”, available at: https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/bombay-high-court-fact-check-unit-it-rules-kunal-kamra-270722; see also AZB & Partners, “Bombay High Court Holds IT Rules Which Empowered Central Government to Establish Fact Check Units as Unconstitutional”, available at: https://www.azbpartners.com/bank/bombay-high-court-holds-it-rules-which-empowered-central-government-to-establish-fact-check-units-as-unconstitutional/.

[15] Storyboard18, “Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Centre’s Appeal against Bombay High Court Ruling Striking Down IT Rules”, available at: https://www.storyboard18.com/how-it-works/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-centre-appeal-on-it-rules-amendment-on-fact-check-unit-91843.htm.

[16] Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1967 SC 1. See also Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India, available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/43629806/.

[17] Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India, (2018) 10 SCC 639. See also full judgment, available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/43629806/.

[18] See Kshitij Saruparia, “When the Court Live-Streams a Draft Order: The Transparency Gap in Fakir Mamad Sameja”, Bar & Bench, 29 May 2026, available at: https://www.barandbench.com/columns/when-the-court-live-streams-a-draft-the-transparency-gap-in-fakir-mamad-sameja.

[19] [Case citation corresponding to (2021) 9 SCC 770].

[20] Chief Election Commissioner of India v. M.R. Vijayabhaskar & Ors., 2021 SCC OnLine SC 364. See also LiveLaw, “Media Cannot Be Stopped from Reporting Oral Remarks of Judges; Court Discussions Are of Public Interest: Supreme Court”, available at: https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/media-cannot-be-stopped-from-reporting-oral-remarks-of-judges-court-discussions-are-of-public-interest-supreme-court-173480; see also Sohini Chowdhury, “Media Reporting of Oral Observations by Judges During Hearing”, LiveLaw, 26 September 2021, available at: https://www.livelaw.in/columns/reporting-oral-observations-in-judicial-proceedings-freedom-of-press-media-gag-182476.

[21] [Case citation corresponding to 2026 INSC 483].

[22] Fakir Mamad Suleman Sameja v. Adani Ports and Special Economic Zones Ltd., order dated 12 May 2026. See Kshitij Saruparia, “When the Court Live-Streams a Draft Order: The Transparency Gap”, Bar & Bench, 29 May 2026, available at: https://www.barandbench.com/columns/when-the-court-live-streams-a-draft-the-transparency-gap-in-fakir-mamad-sameja.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Sahara India Real Estate Corp. Ltd. v. SEBI, (2012) 10 SCC 603. See also full judgment, available at: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/158887669/; see also CaseMine, “Guidelines for Media Reporting on Sub Judice Proceedings: In-Depth Commentary on Sahara India v. SEBI”, available at: https://www.casemine.com/commentary/in/guidelines-for-media-reporting-on-sub-judice-proceedings:-in-depth-commentary-on-sahara-india-v.-sebi-judgment/view. The reference to Sunday Times v. United Kingdom, (1979) 2 EHRR 245, appears in the judgment itself.

[25] BW Legal World, “CJI Surya Kant Clarifies ‘Cockroach’ Remark, Says Media Misquoted”, 18 May 2026, available at: https://www.bwlegalworld.com/article/cji-surya-kant-clarifies-cockroach-remark-says-media-misquoted-607141. See also the same factual account at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_Janta_Party.

[26] Al Jazeera, “‘Cockroach Janta Party’: Top Indian Judge’s Comment Sparks Satire, Protest on Social Media”, 20 May 2026, available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/20/cockroach-janata-party-top-indian-judges-comment-sparks-satire-protest; see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach_Janta_Party.

[27] Al Jazeera, supra note 26; BW Legal World, supra note 25.

[28] India Legal, “Supreme Court Open to Every Citizen, Committed to Hearing All Genuine Grievances in Accordance with Law: CJI Surya Kant”, available at: https://indialegallive.com/constitutional-law-news/courts-news/supreme-court-open-to-every-citizen-committed-to-hearing-all-genuine-grievances-in-accordance-with-law-cji-surya-kant/. See also Bar & Bench, “Exclusive: CJI Surya Kant Clarifies ‘Cockroach’ Remark, Calls for Protocol on Reporting Oral Court Observations”, available at: https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/exclusive-cji-surya-kant-clarifies-cockroach-remark-calls-for-protocol-on-reporting-oral-court-observations.

[29] Bar & Bench, “Can Oral Observations by Courts Be Commercially Exploited, Monetised? Supreme Court Seeks Response from MEITY, BCI”, available at: https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/can-oral-observations-by-courts-be-commercially-exploited-monetised-supreme-court-seeks-response-from-meity-bci.

[30] Deccan Herald, “Concerned over Mixing of Views with Factual Reporting: CJI Ramana”, available at: https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Fconcerned-over-mixing-of-views-with-factual-reporting-cji-ramana-1066092.html; see also LawBeat, “From the Court Reporter’s Diary: A Paradox for Introspection”, available at: https://lawbeat.in/columns/court-reporters-diary-paradox-introspection.

[31] The Tribune, “Karnataka HC Judge Expresses Regret over ‘Pakistan’ Remarks, Says Social Media Reported Out of Context”, available at: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/karnataka-hc-judge-expresses-regret-over-pakistan-remarks-says-social-media-reported-out-of-context.

[32] Deccan Herald, “Allahabad HC Judge’s Controversial Remarks: Supreme Court Collegium Asks Justice Yadav to Be Careful with His Words”, available at: https://www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india%2Fallahabad-hc-judges-controversial-remarks-supreme-court-collegium-asks-justice-yadav-to-be-careful-with-his-words-3322524.

[33] International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, art. 24; United Nations, “International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations”, available at: https://www.un.org/en/node/241007. See also International Commission of Jurists and Amnesty International, “Memorandum Presented by the International Commission of Jurists and Amnesty International on the Right to Truth and Military Tribunals Concerning Enforced Disappearances”, available at: https://www.icj.org/memorandum-presented-by-the-international-commission-of-jurists-and-amnesty-international-on-the-right-to-truth-and-military-tribunals-concerning-enforced-disappearances/.

[34] See “The Elusive Right to Truth in Transitional Human Rights Jurisprudence”, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-and-comparative-law-quarterly/article/elusive-right-to-truth-in-transitional-human-rights-jurisprudence/4A03D1909674ED805CB1434631E54E94.

[35] Defamation Act 1996 (UK), s. 14, as amended by the Defamation Act 2013, s. 7(1). See also “Absolute Privilege”, available at: https://www.carruthers-law.co.uk/articles/absolute-privilege/; see also “Absolute Privilege in English Law”, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_privilege_in_English_law.

[36] See “Effective Use of the Fair Report Privilege”, available at: https://medialaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/FairReportPrivilegeArticle.pdf; see also “Fair Report Privilege”, available at: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/fair-report-privilege/.

[37] Kaushal Kishor v. State of U.P., (2023) 4 SCC 1. See also The Leaflet, “No Grounds Outside Article 19(2) Can Be Availed to Restrict Free Speech: Supreme Court”, available at: https://theleaflet.in/no-grounds-outside-article-192-can-be-availed-to-restrict-free-speech-rules-supreme-court/; see also SCC Online, headnote, available at: https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2023/04/24/2023-scc-vol-4-part-1/.