Authors : Sharuv Sharma
DOI : 10.70183/lijdlr.2026.v04.370
Volume : 4
Issue : 3
Year : 2026
Page No : 2856-2882
The migration of public discourse to social media has multiplied the occasions on which reputation is injured and has changed the way in which that injury is proved. This paper examines the legal regulation of online defamation and digital evidence in the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir, a jurisdiction whose legal landscape was reset after 2019, when the Ranbir Penal Code gave way to the Indian Penal Code and, from 1 July 2024, to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. Using a doctrinal methodology, the paper analyses criminal and civil defamation under section 356 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the intermediary liability regime under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Intermediary Rules, 2021, and the evidentiary framework for electronic records under sections 61 to 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam. It argues that three features of the Jammu & Kashmir context deserve particular attention: the territorial difficulty of prosecuting publication that crosses jurisdictions; the tendency of enforcement agencies to approach online speech through the lens of public order rather than reputation; and the heightened need for forensic integrity where internet access has been restricted and anonymity tools are widely used. The paper finds that the formal legal framework is now uniform with the rest of India but that its application is uneven, that the mandatory two-part certificate with hash value raises the evidentiary threshold in ways that investigators and courts are still adapting to, and that proportionality safeguards remain under-developed. It recommends a graduated shift towards civil remedies, a standard operating procedure for digital evidence, district-level forensic capacity, and judicial guidelines on interim takedown orders.