The Meta-owned messaging service would have no choice but to leave India if the country wants them to stop scrambling data to ensure that only those with the decryption key can gain access, WhatsApp told the Delhi High Court in its legal battle against the Union of India.

WhatsApp's Tejas Karia told a Division Bench in New Delhi: "As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes.

There is no such rule anywhere else in the world, not even Brazil. We will have to keep a complete chain and we don't know which messages will be asked to be decrypted. It means millions and millions of messages will have to be stored for a number of years."

Meta has contested a rule in the country's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which states that messaging services must reveal who sent a message if ordered to do so by a court or authority.

It reads: "A significant social media intermediary providing services primarily in the nature of messaging shall enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource as may be required by a judicial order passed by a court of competent jurisdiction or an order passed under section 69 by the Competent Authority as per the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for interception, monitoring and decryption of information) Rules, 2009."