Kerala High Court dismisses PIL seeking ban on WhatsApp

The Kerala High Court on Monday dismissed a public interest litigation (PIL) that called upon the central government to ban WhatsApp in India for not conforming with the country’s revised IT rules.

A bench of Chief Justice S. Manikumar and Justice Shaji P. Chaly dismissed the writ petition on all prayers, saying that it was premature and should be the job of investigating agencies and courts to decide whether messages from WhatsApp were manipulated by users to not be used as evidence. “We are not inclined to entertain any of the prayers sought for, we are dismissing the writ petition,” the court said.

The petition filed by software engineer Omanakuttan KG sought to move the court to ban WhatsApp, alleging that there was a wide scope of manipulation at the user end and for not being able to trace the origin of messages circulated using its service.

The petition also asked that if WhatsApp was compliant with the European Union’s GDPR policy, why it could not comply with Indian laws. It also asked the court to issue directions to investigating agencies and courts to not rely on contents from WhatsApp for their investigations or trials.

The IT Rules 2021 which came into effect on May 26 mandate that “significant social media intermediaries”, such as WhatsApp, should be able to trace the origin of a particular message sent using its service.

This is apart from other requirements that the amended rules require social networks with over five million users in the country, such as appointment of three key executives—who are permanent employees of the companies and residents of India.

WhatsApp has already filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in the Delhi High Court last month against the new IT rules. The Facebook-owned company in its plea has said complying with the rules will “break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermine people’s right to privacy”.