Spotlight: Delhi High Court Justice Tejas Karia

Spotlight is a series where we shine the, well, spotlight on members of the legal fraternity who made the news over the past week.

Telegram's challenge to the Central government's decision to temporarily ban it in India put the spotlight on the Delhi High Court judge who heard the matter this past week - Justice Tejas Karia.

The ruling assumes significance not merely due to the impact on Indian users who were unable to use Telegram for the few days it was banned. It comes from the ramifications of granting authorities a taste of the power to ban entire online ecosystems if they choose to do so.

While upholding the Central government's decision to block Telegram until NEET-UG re-examinations are over, Justice Karia also held that the government can block access to an entire application or a platform under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act).

The provision lays down the procedure for blocking public access to any "information" through any computer resource in the interests of national security, sovereignty, public order, or related concerns, following prescribed procedures and recorded reasons. Intermediaries that fail to comply with such blocking orders can face up to 7 years’ imprisonment and a fine.

It was the government's stand that the definition of "information" includes the intermediaries/platforms. Justice Karia said that there is no reason to exclude the application or a platform from the ambit of expression "information" contained in Section 2(1)(v) of the IT Act.

Hours after delivering the Telegram verdict, Justice Karia also agreed to urgently hear a petition filed by the Badminton Association of India (BAI) seeking the removal of fake news and posts claiming that Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant, dozens of other judges and Union ministers travelled to London at the expense of the public exchequer to play in a Badminton tournament.

After hearing BAI as well as the Central government, Justice Karia directed the government to issue notifications requiring social media platforms, search engines, digital publishers and other intermediaries to remove, disable and de-index the “false, malicious and derogatory” content within 24 hours.

"Members of the public are further restrained from uploading, publishing, circulating, sharing or otherwise disseminating the Impugned Content on any social media platform, search engine, web-hosting platform, digital media platform or other online media or platform," the Court ordered.

The content to be removed includes reports published by news platforms like The Print, National Herald and The Tribune. A tweet by Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Priyanka Chaturvedi is also listed as the link to be removed.

Justice Karia observed that the material was not criticism or fair reportage but was demonstrably false information which is capable of causing "serious and irreversible injury to public confidence in the justice delivery system".

Apart from these two cases, the Delhi High Court's ongoing summer vacations kept Justice Karia in the limelight during his stint on the vacation bench from June 15 to June 22.

On the first day of his vacation bench, Justice Karia heard over 50 matters – 20 on the Division Bench with Justice Madhu Jain and 32 as a single-judge bench. He sat till 9 PM that day and heard cases filed by the Indian Polo Association (IPA) against the government’s takeover of the Jaipur Polo Ground in Delhi. He refused to pass any status quo order in the matter and asked the district court to decide the IPA’s plea.

He sat past usual court hours on subsequent vacation days as well.

Justice Karia was born on February 1, 1978 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat to a family of judges and lawyers. He chose to follow in his family's footsteps and pursued law after school, procuring his LL.B. from ILS Law College, University of Pune (2000), LL.M. in Corporate Law from University of Gujarat (2002) and LL.M. in International Arbitration and Information Technology Laws from London School of Economics (2003). 

He started his practice at the Ahmedabad city civil courts and went on to practice before the Gujarat High Court and several other trial courts and tribunals in the State. He also conducted a court martial as special defense counsel appointed by Indian Army.

In 2004, Justice Karia moved to Delhi and joined the erstwhile Amarchand Mangaldas & Co. At this firm, he appeared before the Supreme Court and High Courts and tribunals across India.

He specialised in the fields of International and Domestic Commercial Arbitrations and later went on the head the Arbitration practice as Partner at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co (SAM).

He contributed to the drafting of legislation as advisor to the Law Commission of India for the 2015 amendments to the Arbitration Act.

In 2019, he was inducted into the Singapore International Arbitration Centre’s (SIAC) Court of Arbitration.

He was a member of High-Powered Committee for the institutionalisation of arbitration in India in 2019, the Expert Committee for reforms in the Arbitration Act in 2024 and appeared before the Parliamentary Committee for the Commercial Courts Act and Mediation Act. 

During his time at SAM, Justice Karia represented Meta (formerly FaceBook) before various courts in several high profile matters, often to do with data privacy.

He also led the team which handled the Ashneer Grover-Bharat Pe dispute before SIAC.

Justice Karia is also qualified as a Solicitor in England & Wales, a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, London and a Specialist Mediator with SIMC, Singapore.

On February 14, 2025, two weeks after he turned 47 years old, Justice Karia was appointed as a judge of the Delhi High Court. He was one of the first judges in India to come from a law firm and arbitration background.

In fact, his expertise in the field was mentioned in the Collegium resolution recommending his elevation which noted that a High Court like Delhi, which deals with a large volume of cases on arbitration law, would benefit from specialised handling. The resolution added that while Karia's appearances in the High Court may not be as many as would be expected, his appearances in matters of significance before arbitral tribunals make up for that.

Indeed, Justice Karia may be uniquely positioned to expertly handle the cases assigned to him at the High Court, as even during his law firm practice, he dealt with matters relating to information technology law, privacy and data protection, intermediary liability, e-commerce, cybersecurity, e-payments, online safety and content regulations.

While Justice Karia began his stint at the Delhi High Court on a Division Bench with Justice Vibhu Bakhru, he was quickly assigned a single-bench, where he also handled suits for the protection of personality rights. He granted orders in favour of cine actors Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan.

"The unauthorized exploitation of the attributes of an individual’s personality may have two facets – first, violation of their right to protect their personality attributes from being commercially exploited; and second, violation of their right to privacy, which in turn leads to undermining their right to live with dignity," Justice Karia stated in one of the orders.

As a single-judge, Justice Karia also passed orders protecting several OTT streaming platforms against piracy.

In November 2025, he granted an interim injunction to JioStar against unauthorised streaming of the two international cricket series by rogue websites and mobile apps.

On a petition filed by music company Saregama, Justice Karia ordered the suspension of at least 30 websites which allegedly allowed users to download copyrighted content from various streaming platforms.

He also granted dynamic injunctions in favour of Warner Bros, Netflix, Apple, Disney and Crunchyroll to stop the piracy of their copyrighted content. In that order, Justice Karia observed that such copyright infringement ought to be prevented as early as possible as they can quickly turn "hydra-headed".

Justice also protected Indian media organisation TV9 Network from “groundless" copyright infringement threats and copyright strikes on YouTube.

In a trademarks dispute, Justice Karia ruled in favour of Impresario, which operates a chain of popular cafés and co-working style restaurants under the “SOCIAL” name across India. In that order, Justice Karia flagged the practice of deliberate "trade mark squatting".

In a matter related to cloud services taxation, Justice Karia ruled in favour of Amazon, holding that payments made by Indian entities to foreign cloud service providers for availing standardised cloud computing services cannot be treated as royalty or fees for technical services (FTS) under the Income Tax Act, 1961 or the India–United States Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA).

Since the beginning of this year, Justice Karia has been sitting on Division Bench led by Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya, handling public interest litigation (PIL) and other matters of utmost urgency in the national capital.

In January, the Bench held that even if the PM Cares Fund is run or controlled by the government, it would not lose the right to privacy under the Right to Information Act (RTI Act).

It also came to the aid of the unhoused during Delhi's cold wave, directing the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) to take over subways near government hospitals and turn them into night shelters. 

In February, the Bench slammed NGO Save India Foundation for filing repeated PILs against mosques and dargahs challenging decades-old notifications of waqf properties.

In March, it questioned the orders issued by Delhi University (DU) and the Delhi Police, which imposed a blanket ban on protests at the University. The Bench said that it for the police to take action if there are any violations of law and order, but a total prohibition may not be correct.

This is the Bench that came to the aid of wrestler Vinesh Phogat, by allowing her to participate in the Asian Games 2026 selection trials

The Bench noted that Phogat could not meet the Wrestling Federation of India's (WFI) "exclusionary" selection policy only because she was on maternity leave and said that motherhood cannot become a ground for exclusion or marginalisation of female athletes.

Notably, the Division Bench also slammed the WFI for issuing a "deplorable" show-cause notice to Phogat which referred to her disqualification from the Paris Olympics for being overweight as a "national shame". The Bench took strong objection to the choice of words and said that it revealed mala fides on WFI's part.

On several occasions, this Bench pulled up government authorities for not filling up key vacancies in welfare bodies and for allowing the Delhi Commission of Women to remain defunct for over two years.

Recently, the Bench ruled that employees of unaided private schools in the national capital are entitled to child care leaves (CCL) on par with their counterparts in government schools.

In another matter, the Bench stayed the Delhi government's notification which had directed private schools in the national capital to constitute school-level fee regulation committees (SLFRCs) and submit details of the proposed fee for the next three academic years.

In a different PIL, the Bench indicated that it may frame guidelines on child custody, visitation rights and parenting plans tied to relation to matrimonial disputes in Delhi.

Recently, the Bench ordered Google and Apple to act strictly against mobile applications involved in pornography and prostitution and which are available through Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store. The Bench remarked that it cannot "permit the whole generation of the country to be ruined".

Several issues pertaining to the legal community have also been handled by this Bench in the last six months.

In one case, it ordered the Delhi government to formulate a scheme for the welfare of clerks working with lawyers in the national capital.

The Bench rejected the Delhi government’s stand in its status report that the lawyers practising in the capital are financially well-off compared to other States and can take care of their clerks. The Bench ruled that such arguments were absolutely unreasonable saying,

“The contribution of advocates’ bar clerks in dispensation of justice, one of the sovereign functions of the state, cannot be denied or diluted.” 

In a different matter, the Bench held that a bar association is a private body and not a ‘State’ or ‘instrumentality of State’ under Article 12 of the Constitution. Given the private nature of lawyers' associations, the High Court ruled that it cannot issue a writ of mandamus to them in the exercise of powers under Article 226 of the Constitution. 

It also expressed displeasure over lawyers’ contact details being made public and allegedly being misused by candidates contesting the Bar Council of Delhi (BCD) elections to send unsolicited campaign messages.

The Bench has consistently urged the legal community to participate in community initiatives. In January, the Bench requested the Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) to take steps to contribute to the 3000-bed night shelter that the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) is planning to construct to lodge families of the patients who come for treatment at the hospital.

The Bench has also asked the Delhi High Court to frame a policy for speedy return of court fees to litigants once disputes are settled.

Just before the Court closed for the ongoing summer vacation, the Bench rejected a PIL which sought directions to de-register the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and bar its leaders Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and Durgesh Pathak from contesting any elections for refusal to participate in court proceedings before Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma.

In May, the Bench also ruled that the President of India can nominate politicians to the Rajya Sabha under the category of 'persons possessing special knowledge or practical experience' laid down by Article 80(3) of the Constitution. 

As the Court's pre-vacation session came to a close, the Bench was seized of several important matters, including PILs alleging disproportionate recruitment of Muslim persons to the Jamia Millia Islamia University, illegal export of life-saving drugs meant for domestic use and the existence of fake universities.

The Bench was also seized of a petition challenging the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 and the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Rules 2022, which allows police to collect, store and analyse physical and biological samples including retina scans, behavioural attributes and DNA from convicts, arrested persons and others to aid investigations.

However, Justice Karia's involvement in these matters remains unconfirmed as the roster is likely to change once the Court reopens.