Justice in the Dark

**Shreya Banchhor

INTRODUCTION

Less than a month ago, the Supreme Court declined a fresh probe into the Reliance-owned animal rescue and rehabilitation facility, Vantara, despite new information regarding alleged illegalities in animal imports being received from various international investigative sources, including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) Secretariat. However, it still gave orders to tighten CITES compliance, albeit prospectively. 

The reason given for this denial lies in a judicial ordered issued last year. On 15 September 2025, in C.R. Jaya Sukin v. Union of India, the Supreme Court examined allegations that Reliance’s Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre (Vantara) had violated the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, among other statutes. Following an investigation by a Special Investigation Team (“SIT”), the Court accepted the SIT’s report in a sealed cover, released only a short ‘summary’, and then directed that ‘no further complaint or proceeding on the issues on which a finding has been returned by the SIT shall be initiated or entertained’ (¶19(iv)). The full report remains sealed, though curiously handed over to Vantara for its own use (¶19(iii)). 

By pairing such secrecy with preclusion, the order goes beyond previous sealed-cover practices. It foreclosed judicial review, on matters of continuing public interest, without adversarial testing or reasoned disclosure and raises the question: Can a constitutional court announce, on the strength of material it alone has seen in a sealed cover, that no present or future party may ever again litigate the subject? 

This piece argues that the Vantara order raises two significant legal issues. First, the order misapplies the bar on re-litigating a decided matter by using it to preclude everyone, rather than just the original parties, from approaching the court. This is an approach that has been deliberately relaxed since Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of UP, precisely because PILs are not disputes between fixed individual parties. Second, the order violates the principles of natural justice and open justice that the Court itself constitutionalised in Madhyamam Broadcasting Ltd. v. Union of India(2023) (“MediaOne”). 

Part I sketches the sealed-cover framework before Vantara. Part II examines the misuse of res judicata in PILs. Part III addresses the natural-justice and open-justice infirmities. The conclusion proposes a narrow corrective.

I. SEALED-COVER JURISPRUDENCE BEFORE VANTARA

India’s sealed-cover jurisprudence was already fraught before Vantara. Originating in Sections 123–124 of the (now repealed) Indian Evidence Act, 1872 and Order XIII Rule 7 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013, it allowed the withholding of documents whose disclosure would be injurious to public interest. Over time, however, courts expanded its use, often justifying non-disclosure through  questionable claims of state secrecy. It has been invoked in cases like the Rafale review and the Narendra Modi biopic matter. 

The constitutional correction finally came in MediaOne. Speaking through Chandrachud CJI, the Supreme Court held that sealed-cover adjudication ‘violates both the principles of natural justice and open justice’ (¶146), since the affected party cannot meet the case against them, the court’s reasoning becomes unchallengeable (¶58). The Court constitutionalised openness as the rule and confidentiality as a narrowly tailored exception (¶67), to be assessed under the proportionality framework laid down in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2019) and Modern Dental College v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2016). 

Vantara departs sharply from that framework. It does not merely receive evidence in a sealed cover without assessing the proportionality of such an approach; it converts that evidence into a permanent bar on future proceedings. Neither the Evidence Act nor any constitutional precedent permits secret information to harden, in this manner, into an ouster of jurisdiction.

II. RES JUDICATA AND THE PIL: THE VANTARA INVERSION

Res judicata, codified in Section 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, bars re-litigation only where four preconditions are satisfied: (1) the identity of the parties is the same, (2) the issue is directly and substantially the same, (3) a final decision on merits has previously occurred,, and (4) the earlier adjudication was by a competent court with jurisdiction. In Daryao v. State of UP (1961) , the Court stressed that the doctrine applies only between the same parties who have had a fair hearing and a fair opportunity to prove their case in a court of competent jurisdiction (¶12). None of these preconditions are satisfied in Vantara. The SIT report was perused privately. The petitioners—and the public on whose behalf they purported to act—lacked access to the underlying material. The sole evidence relied upon was never subjected to adversarial testing.

The deeper difficulty, however, lies in the very fact that Vantara was a PIL. The Supreme Court has consistently held that res judicata applies, if at all, only with significant qualification to PILs. The rationale behind this is to ensure that future access to remedies is not hindered, especially in cases regarding the environment, such as the present case. In Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of UP, the Court ruled out res judicata by observing that PIL ‘writ petitions are not inter partes disputes’, and that technical rules of procedure do not apply in matters of grave public importance. While Forward Construction Co. v. Prabhat Mandal extended res judicata to bona fide PILs through Explanation VI of Section 11, CPC, this was only done to ensure that the same petitioner does not bring the same case repeatedly. The doctrine has never been understood as a sword the Court itself may wield against the public.

Vantara inverts this settled position. The preclusion clause does not bind only the petitioners before the Court; it binds non-parties and prospective litigants, converting what should have been finality between fixed parties into immunity against everyone for Vantara. By offering such protection, the Court has gone against its own principle, wherein public interest should override private interests. The very feature of PILs that justified loosening procedural rules such as res judicata —that the petition is not a private dispute but an instrument for the vindication of public rights —is now being marshalled to extinguish the rights of the very public the litigation was meant to serve. This is especially concerning given that the present case was for environmental protection, a field in which PILs have had transformative impact, against an entity whose claim as a sanctuary for the wildlife keeps coming under the radar. 

It is therefore not enough to say, as the order assumes, that finality is desirable in PILs to prevent vexatious re-litigation. That concern can be met through the ordinary application of Forward Construction: by binding this petitioner on this issue. Vantara goes much further. The clause prospectively prevents all adjudicating bodies from examining Vantara even on the basis of future violations or new evidence. By disabling judicial review in this manner, the order contravenes numerous binding precents, including Kesavananda Bharati, that recognise judicial review as part of the Constitution’s basic structure and established that it can never be excluded. 

III. NATURAL JUSTICE AND OPEN JUSTICE UNDER PIL 

Principles of natural justice demand that cases be dealt with in a fair manner. In MediaOne, the Court held that the sealed-cover practice creates an ‘informational asymmetry’ between parties (¶59). Vantara intensifies that asymmetry. The respondent received the sealed report; the petitioners and the public did not. The Court thus denied petitioners a chance to view the full SIT report without providing any reasons for the same. By doing so, the Court has entrenched upon their right to know the claims of the opposing party and the evidence that the Court had relied upon to come to its decision, thereby violating their right to a full hearing. 

Open justice fares no better. Naresh Mirajkar v. State of Maharashtra (1967) held that courts do not possess any general or inherent power to dispense with open and public proceedings (¶20). Reason-giving is one of the core tenets of natural justice, such that the legitimacy of judicial institutions themselves is tied to their visible reasoning and the notion that justice must not only be done, but it must also be seen to be done. The Bench in Vantara, however, perused the sealed report privately and offered only conclusive statements. While Order XIII Rule 7 does allow for confidentiality on the basis of legitimate grounds such as public interest and state security, none of these grounds were engaged with in the order besides citing vague, unreasoned invocations of “sensitiveness” and “confidentiality”. While the legal rationale appears to be the protection of Vantara’s commercial interests, this reasoning unexplained in the order. It is also untenable in light of serious environmental and public interest concerns surrounding this case. 

Even Justice Chelameswar (Retd.), who chaired the SIT, has stated publicly that he is unaware of the reasons behind the Court’s direction to keep the report sealed. When the head of the investigation cannot understand why his own report has been concealed, the Court has not merely failed to give reasons, it has created a legitimate apprehension of injustice being done. 

These infirmities sit uncomfortably alongside an unsettled antecedent question: to what extent do natural justice and open justice apply within PIL at all? The orthodox answer — that PILs are non-adversarial and therefore subject to relaxed rules of hearing — has long been used to justify ex parte commissions, refusal to hear interested parties, and the routine elevation of court-appointed experts over the petitioner’s evidence. Vantara follows the same procedural pathology in a different register. The Court accepts a fact-finding report compiled in eighteen days, hears no evidence to the contrary, gives no reasons of its own, and then forecloses any future challenge. It is exactly such delegitimisation of basic principles of constitutionalism in PIL matters by the Courts that Anuj Bhuwania warns about in his seminal work. 

It is essential, therefore, to distinguish between two propositions that PIL doctrine has tended to conflate. The first tenet is that strict adversarial procedure is not always required in PILs. The second claim is that natural justice and open justice are diluted in PILs because PIL is ‘different’. The first claim is defensible; the second is not. Natural justice and open justice are constitutional norms flowing from Articles 14 that bind all courts in all proceedings, and confidentiality is permissible only as a very narrow exception, justified by the proportionality test and balancing competing interests. PIL cannot operate as a self-certifying exemption from these norms. Where it has been allowed to do so, as in Vantara, the result is not flexible justice but unaccountable adjudication which threatens to undermine the very legitimacy of courts.

CONCLUSION

The cumulative consequence of the Vantara order is grave. It misapplies res judicata, which is a doctrine the Court has long treated with caution in PILs, to bind both present and future non-parties on the strength of evidence none of them has seen. It erodes the norms of natural justice and open justice that MediaOne had restored. And it does so through the very procedural informality that Bhuwania has identified as PIL’s problem: a jurisdiction in which the absence of process makes any outcome possible, including the silencing of the public itself.

The corrective is narrow. The Court should clarify that no finding derived from sealed material may carry prospective preclusive effect against non-parties. Such a clarification could be issued through a Practice Direction amending Order XIII Rule 7 of the Supreme Court Rules, requiring that any order based on confidential evidence in a PIL specify, on its face, the parties bound, the issues decided, and the avenues of review that remain open. Where genuine confidentiality is required, the proportionality framework of MediaOne already supplies the test, and the special-advocate model contemplated at ¶171 of that decision already supplies the procedural remedy. None of this requires reinventing the law; it requires only that the Court apply, in PILs, the same constitutional discipline it applies elsewhere.

Until that discipline is restored, Vantara will stand as a precedent for something far worse than the routine indulgence of sealed covers. It will stand for the proposition that the Court may, under the guise of serving public interest, in fact close its doors the public.

**Shreya Banchhor and Aashmit Gupta are 3rd Year B.A.LLB. students at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. 

**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.