Judicial Control of Digital Power: Supreme Court Oversight over Big Tech and State Surveillance after 2020

Abstract: This article critically examines the Supreme Court of India as a constitutional check on "Digital Absolutism"- the unregulated accumulation of digital power by the surveillance state and platform corporations. Drawing on Puttaswamy (2017), the CCI-WhatsApp litigation, the Pegasus adjudication, and the challenges to the IT Rules 2021, it argues that while the Court has developed a sophisticated proportionality framework for digital rights, three structural deficits - information asymmetry, absence of standing surveillance oversight, and temporal mismatch - render that framework architecturally insufficient. The article proposes a tripartite institutional reform: a Surveillance Authorisation Act, a structurally independent Data Protection Board, and a specialist Digital Rights Tribunal. Keywords: Digital rights, judicial review, surveillance, data protection, Big Tech, proportionality, Pegasus, DPDP Act, IT Rules 2021, constitutional firewall.