Yashwant Sinha & Ors. v. Central Bureau of Investigation through its Director & Anr. and connected matters
Background
This order decides a preliminary objection, not the review petitions themselves. After the Supreme Court had earlier declined (in December 2018) to order an independent probe into the Rafale fighter jet procurement deal, the petitioners (including former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha) filed review petitions relying on three internal Ministry of Defence notes relating to the deal that had been published in a newspaper without official authorisation. The Union of India raised a preliminary objection that these documents had been "unauthorizedly removed" from government custody, were protected under the Official Secrets Act and Section 123 of the Evidence Act, and that relying on them was impermissible and should bar the review petitions outright. The question before the Court in this specific judgment, covering the review petition and a connected Miscellaneous Application (M.A. No. 403/2019) concerning the use of these documents, was only whether the documents could be looked at and relied upon at all, not the final merits of the Rafale review itself.
Decision Breakdown
This order decides a preliminary objection, not the review petitions themselves. The Court held that neither the Right to Information Act, the Official Secrets Act, nor Section 123 of the Evidence Act barred reliance on the documents, because the manner in which a document was sourced or obtained does not affect its evidentiary relevance, and courts have historically permitted reliance on leaked material (citing the US "Pentagon Papers" precedent and English privilege case law) once it is already in the public domain and its authenticity is not disputed. The Court also rejected the Attorney General's broader submission that the matter should be dismissed outright as being within the "political domain" beyond judicial review, invoking the principle that courts must decide constitutional questions dispassionately regardless of political consequence. It accordingly dismissed the Union of India's preliminary objection and held that the documents could be taken into account. Justice K.M. Joseph, concurring separately, added that because the documents had already been published in a national newspaper and their contents were not disputed, there was no proper basis to invoke privilege to exclude them. The Court made clear that this ruling decided only the preliminary admissibility question: the review petitions themselves would still have to be adjudicated on their own merits afterward (which the Court did separately in a later judgment dismissing the review).
Lesson Learnt
The government cannot block scrutiny of its own leaked internal documents merely by invoking secrecy laws once those documents are genuinely in the public domain and their authenticity is unchallenged: courts will weigh public interest in transparency against claims of privilege rather than accepting a blanket "state secret" objection.