Landmark Cases — Shreya Singhal, Anvar P.V., Avnish Bajaj

No statute on the Indian books has been reshaped by litigation as decisively as the Information Technology Act, 2000. Three judgments tower over the field: Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, which struck down Section 66A and rewrote the law of online speech; Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, which made the Section 65B certificate the gatekeeper of every piece of electronic evidence; and Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), the Bazee.com prosecution that first forced courts to ask whether the human behind an online marketplace can be jailed for what its users upload. Read together, they map the constitutional, evidentiary and intermediary-liability spine of Indian cyber-law, and they are the most heavily examined cases in this subject. This chapter works through each decision, its verified citation, its precise holding and its afterlife in later benches.

Why these three cases anchor the syllabus

Examiners return to Shreya Singhal, Anvar P.V. and Avnish Bajaj because each answers a different foundational question about life under the Information Technology Act, 2000. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1, is the constitutional case: it tests how far the State may criminalise online speech against Article 19(1)(a). Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, (2014) 10 SCC 473, is the evidentiary case: it tells you when a WhatsApp message, a CCTV clip or a server log may even be looked at by a court. Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 116 (2005) DLT 427, is the liability case: it asks who answers for unlawful content when the platform is a mere conduit. A candidate who can state the verified citation, the operative section and the ratio of all three has covered the constitutional, procedural and commercial faces of the Act in a single sweep. For the statutory backdrop, read this alongside the introduction to the Act and the chapter on definitions, and treat the present chapter as the case-law spine of the Information Technology Act notes hub.

Shreya Singhal: the facts and the challenged provisions

The litigation began after two young women were arrested in Maharashtra in 2012 — one for a Facebook post questioning the shutdown of Mumbai following a political leader's death, the other merely for "liking" it. The arrests, made under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, triggered a wave of writ petitions led by law student Shreya Singhal under Article 32. The petitioners attacked Section 66A, which punished with up to three years' imprisonment the sending, by computer or communication device, of any information that was "grossly offensive", of a "menacing character", or which the sender knew to be false but sent for the purpose of causing "annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will". The petitions also challenged Section 69A (the power to block public access to information) and Section 79 read with the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which governed when an intermediary lost its safe-harbour protection. The matter was heard by a Division Bench of Justices J. Chelameswar and Rohinton Fali Nariman, and decided on 24 March 2015.

Shreya Singhal: striking down Section 66A

The Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by Nariman J., struck down Section 66A in its entirety as unconstitutional. The Court held that the provision fell foul of Article 19(1)(a) and was not saved by any of the eight heads of reasonable restriction in Article 19(2). Two doctrinal pillars carried the result. First, vagueness and overbreadth: words such as "grossly offensive", "menacing" and "annoyance" had no judicially manageable standard, leaving citizens and police without notice of what was forbidden and casting a chilling effect over legitimate expression. Second, the Court drew its now-canonical tripartite distinction between discussion, advocacy and incitement, holding that only speech amounting to incitement — bearing a proximate and direct nexus to one of the Article 19(2) interests such as public order — may be restricted, while mere discussion or advocacy of even unpopular ideas is protected. Because Section 66A swept in all three, it was struck down root and branch rather than merely read down. The verified citation is Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1, also reported as AIR 2015 SC 1523. This holding governs every later free-speech challenge to online-content offences and is the single most cited proposition in the subject.

Two further strands of reasoning repay close study. The Court rejected the Union's argument that the provision could be saved by reading the vague terms narrowly, holding that where an enactment is capable of being applied to perfectly innocent speech as much as to harmful speech, the law itself — not merely its application — is bad, and the possibility of abuse is a relevant ground of invalidity. The Court also distinguished the standards governing the medium: it accepted that the internet is a distinct medium warranting its own regulatory architecture, but held that this distinctiveness justifies how speech is regulated, not a lower threshold of constitutional protection for the speech itself. Finally, the judgment located Section 66A's vice in its want of any nexus to the eight enumerated heads of Article 19(2): an offence resting on "annoyance" or "inconvenience" simply does not correspond to public order, decency, morality, defamation or incitement to an offence, and a restriction untethered from those heads cannot stand whatever its drafting.

Shreya Singhal: Section 69A upheld, Section 79 read down

The same Bench treated the two surviving provisions very differently, and candidates routinely lose marks by blurring them. Section 69A (blocking of access by the Government) and the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009, were upheld. The Court reasoned that Section 69A is narrowly drawn: blocking is permitted only on the specified grounds, only after a reasoned written order, and is subject to procedural safeguards including a hearing and the possibility of judicial review — a structure absent from Section 66A. Section 79, the intermediary safe-harbour, together with Rule 3(4) of the 2011 Intermediaries Guidelines, was read down rather than struck down. The Court held that an intermediary is obliged to take down content only upon receiving actual knowledge through a court order, or a notification by an appropriate Government or its agency, that the material relates to an unlawful act within Article 19(2). A private complaint or a unilateral demand by an aggrieved person does not trigger the obligation. This reading insulated platforms from the impossible burden of adjudicating every grievance themselves, and it remains the foundation of India's intermediary regime, later restructured by the 2021 Rules. The connection between safe harbour and the statutory machinery for handling electronic records is developed further in the chapter on attribution, acknowledgment and dispatch of electronic records.

Anvar P.V.: the facts and the Section 65B question

Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer arose from an election petition. The appellant had lost a Kerala Assembly election and challenged the result under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, alleging that the returned candidate had circulated defamatory and corrupt-practice material through songs, announcements and CDs played at public meetings. To prove this, he relied heavily on electronic records — audio and video copies — produced as secondary evidence without the certificate contemplated by Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. The High Court rejected the petition, and the question that reached the Supreme Court was deceptively narrow but vast in consequence: may a court receive a computer output — a copy stored on a CD, DVD, pen-drive or server printout — as evidence of its contents without compliance with Section 65B? The matter was heard by a three-judge Bench of Chief Justice R.M. Lodha and Justices Kurian Joseph and Rohinton Fali Nariman, and decided on 18 September 2014.

Anvar P.V.: the certificate becomes mandatory

The Court held that Sections 65A and 65B form a complete code for the admissibility of electronic records, and that a computer output is admissible as secondary evidence of its contents only if the conditions of Section 65B are satisfied, including the production of the certificate prescribed by Section 65B(4) identifying the electronic record, describing the manner of its production and certifying the proper functioning of the computer. The generalia non derogant principle applied: being the special and later provisions dealing specifically with electronic records, Sections 65A and 65B override the general secondary-evidence regime in Sections 63 and 65. The Court was emphatic that absent the certificate, an electronic record cannot be proved by oral evidence, nor can its contents be let in by examining a witness — a route that Navjot Sandhu had wrongly permitted. The verified citation is Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, (2014) 10 SCC 473. A crucial qualification, often missed, is that the certificate is required only when the electronic record is tendered as a copy or computer output; where the original electronic device itself is produced and proved, Section 65B has no application — a point clarified in later decisions. For the statutory framework on what makes a record "secure", see the companion chapter on secure electronic records and signatures.

Anvar P.V.: overruling Navjot Sandhu

The most examinable feature of Anvar P.V. is its overruling of State (NCT of Delhi) v. Navjot Sandhu, (2005) 11 SCC 600 — the Parliament Attack case. In Navjot Sandhu, a two-judge Bench had held that even without a Section 65B certificate, the contents of an electronic record such as printouts of mobile-phone call records could be proved as secondary evidence under Sections 63 and 65 of the Evidence Act by oral testimony. Anvar P.V., a larger three-judge Bench, expressly held that this proposition "does not lay down the correct legal position" and overruled it to that extent. The shift was profound: Navjot Sandhu had treated Section 65B as optional, whereas Anvar P.V. made it the mandatory and exclusive gateway. The practical effect was immediate — call-data records, CCTV footage, server logs and CD/DVD copies became inadmissible unless accompanied by the certificate, forcing investigators and litigants alike to re-engineer how they collect and tender digital proof.

It is worth being precise about why the larger Bench felt entitled to overrule a co-ordinate two-judge view. Anvar P.V. reasoned that Section 65B, inserted by the Information Technology Act, 2000 itself as a consequential amendment to the Evidence Act, is a special provision crafted for a special class of evidence; permitting parties to bypass it through the general secondary-evidence route would render the carefully drawn safeguards of sub-sections (2) to (4) — concerning the integrity and regular operation of the computer that produced the output — entirely otiose. The Court thus treated the certificate not as an empty formality but as the evidentiary substitute for cross-examining the machine: it is the device by which a court satisfies itself that the output faithfully reflects the data, in the absence of the original. Read this way, the much-criticised rigidity of Anvar P.V. is really a demand for reliability, and that framing is the most sophisticated way to present the holding in a mains answer.

Anvar P.V.'s afterlife: Shafhi Mohammad and Arjun Panditrao

The Anvar line did not settle instantly. In Shafhi Mohammad v. State of Himachal Pradesh, (2018) 2 SCC 801, a two-judge Bench diluted the rule, holding that the certificate requirement was procedural and could be relaxed where a party genuinely could not produce the certificate because the device was not in its possession. Because Shafhi Mohammad (two judges) clashed with Anvar P.V. (three judges), the conflict was referred to a larger Bench. The matter was resolved in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal, (2020) 7 SCC 1, where a three-judge Bench restored and reaffirmed Anvar P.V., holding the Section 65B(4) certificate to be a mandatory pre-condition for the admissibility of electronic evidence tendered as a copy, and expressly overruling Shafhi Mohammad. The Court added a humane gloss: a party unable to obtain the certificate despite its best efforts may apply to the trial court, which can summon the certificate from the person in lawful control of the device. For the judiciary aspirant, the chain is the answer — Navjot Sandhu (wrong) was overruled by Anvar P.V., briefly unsettled by Shafhi Mohammad, and finally settled by Arjun Panditrao.

Avnish Bajaj: the Bazee.com prosecution

Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi) grew out of the notorious "DPS MMS" episode. In late 2004, a listing offering an obscene video clip for sale appeared on bazee.com, an online marketplace then owned by a company of which Avnish Bajaj was the Managing Director. The clip itself was never hosted on the site; the listing offered to sell it, and a buyer transaction followed before the listing was deactivated. The police registered a case and the charge-sheet arraigned three accused — the student-seller who posted the listing, an employee, and Avnish Bajaj personally — invoking Sections 292 and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (sale of obscene material) and Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form). Bajaj moved the Delhi High Court under Section 482 CrPC to quash the proceedings against him, contending that as a director of an intermediary marketplace he had no personal role and no actual knowledge of the offending listing. The petition was decided by Justice Vikramajit Sen on 21 December 2004, reported as 116 (2005) DLT 427 (and also as 2005 (3) CompLJ 364 and 2005 (79) DRJ 576).

Avnish Bajaj: directorial liability and the intermediary defence

The Delhi High Court drew a careful line between the company and the individual. On the IPC charges, the Court discharged Avnish Bajaj of the offences under Sections 292 and 294 IPC, holding that those provisions did not contemplate vicarious liability of a director for a company's acts and there was no prima facie material showing his personal involvement in the listing. On Section 67 of the IT Act, the Court took a more nuanced view: it observed that a prima facie case under Section 67 was made out against the company because the obscene material had been made available for sale through the website, but that the company itself had not been arraigned as an accused. The Court further noted that directorial liability could only attach through Section 85 of the IT Act (offences by companies), which requires the company to be charged and requires averments that the director was in charge of and responsible for the conduct of its business — averments absent from the charge-sheet. The case thus crystallised the principle that an intermediary's officer cannot be saddled with criminal liability merely by virtue of his position, without statutory machinery and specific allegations. It is the doctrinal seed from which the modern safe-harbour debate under Section 79 grew.

The decision also exposed a drafting gap that Parliament later addressed. At the time, the unamended Section 79 of the IT Act offered only a thin, conditional protection to a "network service provider", and the Court's discomfort with prosecuting a marketplace operator for a user's listing fed directly into the 2008 amendment, which recast Section 79 as a broad, horizontally applicable safe harbour for all intermediaries subject to due-diligence conditions. Avnish Bajaj is therefore best understood as a transitional decision: it applied the law as it then stood, discharged the director on the IPC counts, flagged the unsatisfactory state of intermediary liability, and in doing so helped catalyse the statutory reform that Shreya Singhal would later refine by reading down the post-amendment Section 79. Candidates who trace this arc — judicial unease in 2004-05, legislative response in 2008-09, constitutional settlement in 2015 — show command of the subject's evolution rather than isolated case recall.

Avnish Bajaj in the Supreme Court: Sharat Babu Digumarti

The saga did not end at the High Court. The Supreme Court closed the chapter for the individual in Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), (2012) 12 SCC 731, holding that the director could not continue to be prosecuted without the company being arraigned and without the Section 85 foundation. The related and equally examinable decision is Sharat Babu Digumarti v. Government (NCT of Delhi), (2017) 2 SCC 18, concerning the same Bazee.com facts as against another official. There the Supreme Court held that where an act is an offence relating to obscene electronic content, the special law — Section 67 of the IT Act — prevails over the general law in Section 292 IPC by virtue of the non-obstante clause in Section 81 of the IT Act, so that a person already discharged or cleared under the IT Act regime could not be re-prosecuted for the same conduct under the Penal Code. Sharat Babu Digumarti is therefore the authority for the proposition that the IT Act, being a special statute with an overriding effect, governs offences involving electronic obscenity to the exclusion of overlapping IPC provisions.

Reading the three together: speech, proof and liability

Placed side by side, the three judgments perform complementary functions in the architecture of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Shreya Singhal polices the input side — what content the State may criminalise and when an intermediary must remove it — anchoring online speech to the constitutional discipline of Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(2). Anvar P.V. polices the proof side — once content or conduct exists, whether a court may receive the electronic record of it at all, gatekept by the Section 65B certificate. Avnish Bajaj, with its Supreme Court coda in Sharat Babu Digumarti, polices the liability side — who bears criminal responsibility when unlawful content passes through a platform, and how the special IT Act regime displaces the general Penal Code. A judiciary answer that frames the three this way — speech, proof, liability — demonstrates synthesis rather than rote recall, and it situates each case within the wider statutory scheme explored across the notes hub.

Exam pointers and common traps

Several recurring errors cost marks. First, do not say Shreya Singhal struck down Section 69A — it upheld Section 69A and the 2009 Blocking Rules; only Section 66A was struck down, and Section 79 with the 2011 Guidelines was read down. Second, do not state that Anvar P.V. requires a certificate in every case — it does not apply where the original device is produced, a point firmed up in Arjun Panditrao. Third, keep the overruling chain crisp: Anvar P.V. overruled Navjot Sandhu; Arjun Panditrao overruled Shafhi Mohammad and reaffirmed Anvar P.V. Fourth, on Avnish Bajaj, remember the split outcome — discharge on IPC Sections 292/294 against the director, but a prima facie case under Section 67 against the company, with directorial liability hinging on Section 85. Fifth, attribute the special-law-prevails holding correctly to Sharat Babu Digumarti and its reliance on the overriding effect of the IT Act. Mastery of these distinctions, together with the statutory groundwork in the introduction and definitions chapters, equips you to handle any problem question on landmark IT Act jurisprudence.