The Student’s Federation of India (SFI) has approached the Delhi High Court challenging the alleged delay by the Central Government’s Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) in deciding its appeal against Instagram’s permanent disabling of one of its accounts.

Justice Amit Mahajan is scheduled to hear the matter on September 24.

SFI, the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said its Delhi Instagram account was permanently disabled on July 5. Instagram reportedly told SFI that the account “may be associated with another account that has gone against our rules” and therefore violated its community standards relating to account integrity.

According to SFI, Instagram did not provide any further details or identify the account allegedly linked to it.

The account was created in 2018 and had around 13,000 followers before it was disabled.

SFI said it first appealed against the decision on July 7 and subsequently approached Meta’s grievance officer on July 9. After receiving no response, it filed an appeal before the GAC on August 12.

However, the petition stated that as of September 16, the GAC website continued to show the appeal as “under process”, despite more than 30 days having passed.

SFI has relied on Rule 3A(4) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which requires the GAC to deal with appeals expeditiously and endeavour to resolve them finally within 30 calendar days.

The petition also seeks a direction to the GAC to conduct the appeal process in accordance with the fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 19(1)(a), 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution.

The petition has been filed through advocate Naman Kumar.