The Delhi high court on Tuesday ordered the removal within 24 hours of all existing allegedly defamatory content, including reports, social media posts, videos, and other material, uploaded from IP addresses in India linking Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s daughter, Himayani Puri, to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A bench of Justice Mini Pushkarna declined to order an immediate global takedown of the content, but directed that material uploaded outside India be blocked from being accessed within the country.
The court also issued summons in Himayani’s defamation suit and fixed August 7 as the next date of hearing.
“Issue summons. Defendants number 1 to 14 and defendant number 21 (John Doe— unknown parties) are directed to forthwith take down/remove the URLs, links of the impugned content as detailed within a period of 24 hours. In case the content is not taken down in 24 hours, defendant number 15 to 18 (social media intermediaries) shall take down, remove and block access to the posts, articles and links as detailed in annexure A,” the court said in the order.
“It is directed that the directions as passed today are directions to be followed in the jurisdiction of India and Indian domain. The present injunction order operates within the Indian domain regarding the content that has been uploaded from IP addresses within India. Insofar as the URLs that are attached as annexure with the present order have been uploaded from outside India, the defendants are directed to disable them from viewing the same in the Indian domain”, it added.
{{/usCountry}}“It is directed that the directions as passed today are directions to be followed in the jurisdiction of India and Indian domain. The present injunction order operates within the Indian domain regarding the content that has been uploaded from IP addresses within India. Insofar as the URLs that are attached as annexure with the present order have been uploaded from outside India, the defendants are directed to disable them from viewing the same in the Indian domain”, it added.
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This came after Himayani Puri’s counsel, Mahesh Jethmalani, Pramod Kumar Dubey, and Shantanu Agarwal, urged the court to order a global takedown, arguing that their client, a resident of New York, had been subjected to a “scurrilous attack” driven by some sources, solely because she is the daughter of a cabinet minister.
However, counsel for social media intermediaries, including Google and Meta, opposed the request for a global takedown, arguing that the question of whether Indian courts have jurisdiction to direct social media intermediaries to remove content worldwide is currently pending before a high court’s division bench.
Meta’s lawyer Arvind Datar, however, submitted that the court could still pass directions concerning content uploaded within India.
Counsel for the YouTube channel Jana Gana Mana 24x7 opposed the suit, arguing that the videos in question were an exercise of journalistic freedom, merely raising questions based on another defendant’s tweet, and that such fair journalism should be allowed.
In her suit, Himayani stated that starting February 22, 2026, a series of false, misleading, and defamatory posts and articles were published and amplified across social media and intermediary platforms, including X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, digital news portals, blogs, and other web-based publications.
Terming the allegations as false, she in her suit, had said that unfounded claims were strategically propagated through sensationalist and manipulative formats, including edited videos, misleading captions, and doctored thumbnails, designed to maximize public outrage.