Sealed cover justice: When secrecy becomes a shield and clean chits raise eyebrows

"The report is taken on record. It shall remain in a sealed cover."

Few procedural directions appear as routine in the Supreme Court as these words. Yet, behind them lies one of the most important constitutional questions confronting Indian justice: when should a court permit secrecy and when does secrecy begin to undermine justice itself?

Every legal system accepts that some information deserves protection. The difficulty begins when confidentiality becomes the default rather than the exception. Over the past decade, sealed covers have appeared in cases involving black money, Rafale, Pegasus, Adani and Vantara, among others. Each invoked a different justification, national security, treaty obligations, privacy or regulatory confidentiality. The constitutional question is not whether these grounds are legitimate. It is whether the Supreme Court has applied them consistently, proportionately and with adequate reasons. That question has become even more significant after the Court's landmark judgment in MediaOne.

The debate over sealed covers should begin not with the practice, but with the law. Order XIII Rule 7 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013  permits the Court to withhold copies of material that is confidential, directed to be kept in a sealed cover, or whose publication is considered not to be in the public interest. But the Rule does not itself prescribe a detailed test for determining when secrecy is necessary, how much of the material must remain confidential, or how long that confidentiality should continue.

That gap assumes constitutional importance because secrecy sits uneasily with two foundational principles of adjudication: natural justice and open justice.

The Supreme Court's 2023 judgment in Madhyamam Broadcasting Ltd. v. Union of India (MediaOne) brought these concerns into sharp focus. The case arose after the Kerala High Court had relied upon material disclosed to it by the Union government in a sealed cover while upholding the denial of security clearance to the news channel.

The Supreme Court rejected the routine use of such undisclosed material, emphasising that sealed cover proceedings can undermine natural justice, open justice and reasoned decision-making. It also stressed the need to consider less restrictive alternatives to complete non-disclosure, including redaction and disclosure of non-sensitive portions or summaries.

The significance of MediaOne extends beyond the particular dispute. It provides a constitutional lens through which other uses of sealed covers can be examined. The question is no longer simply whether the State or another party has identified something as confidential. The Court must ask why it is confidential, whether disclosure would cause the harm claimed, whether that harm can be avoided by narrower means and whether withholding the material unfairly prejudices the opposing party.

Against this constitutional framework, this article examines a selection of sealed-cover cases to see how these principles have operated in practice and whether secrecy was confined to what was genuinely necessary.

The black money litigation offers perhaps the clearest illustration of why secrecy cannot be examined in isolation from the public interest at stake. The issue was not merely the confidentiality of foreign bank information. It was the alleged failure of the State to investigate unaccounted wealth stashed abroad, prosecute those responsible and, ultimately, bring the money back to India.

In Ram Jethmalani v. Union of India, the Supreme Court was confronted with allegations of large sums of unaccounted money held in foreign banks and tax havens. The Court constituted a Special Investigation Team and gave it a broad mandate: investigate the generation of such money, the unlawful means by which it was transferred out of India and the means by which it could be brought back.

Sealed covers subsequently entered the proceedings. In April 2014, the Union placed material concerning foreign-held accounts before the Court in sealed covers. After the investigations had concluded, the Court directed the Union to furnish that material to the petitioners.

However in August 2014, the SIT's first report on black money was placed before the Court in a sealed cover and kept confidential. The Court disclosed little about what it contained, saying only that the SIT had made “some progress” in bringing the money back. The report itself remained under wraps.

However, the larger question was always: where is the money?

The Court itself had made clear that its concern was not merely disclosure of names. In January 2015, it said it was interested in the money coming back rather than merely in making names public.

That is where the sealed cover practice becomes particularly troubling. If the report explaining the progress remains hidden while the public is left with little more than an assurance of “some progress”, secrecy begins to look less like protection and more like insulation from scrutiny.

The black money litigation, therefore, provides a hard test of MediaOne: confidentiality may justify protecting particular information, but it cannot become a shield against accountability for the very public purpose for which the investigation was undertaken.

The Rafale litigation presented a different justification for secrecy: national security. The controversy concerned the procurement of 36 Rafale fighter aircraft and allegations surrounding the decision-making and pricing process. During the proceedings, the Union government placed a confidential note before the Supreme Court in a sealed cover, including information concerning the pricing and procurement process. The Court ultimately declined to interfere with the procurement decision or order a court-monitored investigation into the allegations.

National security is perhaps the strongest justification for restricting disclosure. But the problem is where the line is drawn. The Rafale controversy was not about revealing operational secrets or battlefield capabilities. It concerned how a major defence procurement decision was made, what it cost and whether the process followed the required safeguards.

The Court could legitimately protect genuinely sensitive military information. But that does not mean every aspect of a defence procurement becomes immune from scrutiny. National security cannot become a blanket shield around governmental decision-making.

Rafale showed the very problem that MediaOne later warned against: the Court saw material that the petitioners and the public could not. The judges could examine the government's claims, but those challenging the decision could not properly test them. Once national security is invoked, secrecy can protect not just sensitive information, but the government's decision itself from proper scrutiny.

The Pegasus controversy brought sealed cover secrecy into its most troubling territory. The allegation was no longer merely that the government possessed sensitive information; it was that State agencies may have used sophisticated spyware to surveil journalists, activists, lawyers, opposition politicians and others critical of the government.

The Union government declined to file a detailed affidavit on whether Pegasus had been used by its agencies, citing national security. The Supreme Court did not accept that refusal as sufficient to close the matter. Instead, it appointed an independent technical committee under the supervision of former Supreme Court Justice RV Raveendran to examine the allegations.

Of course, intelligence capabilities, sources and methods may legitimately require secrecy. But that is different from refusing to answer the basic question of whether such technology was deployed against citizens.

That distinction makes Pegasus fundamentally different from Rafale. In a defence procurement, national security may protect genuinely sensitive military information. In Pegasus, the State itself was the subject of the allegation.

The constitutional concern was, therefore, not confined to privacy under Article 21. If State surveillance was selectively deployed against political opponents or critics, it would raise a deeper question of equality under Article 14 and the abuse of State power.

Pegasus thus presents the most uncomfortable version of the sealed-cover problem: can the State invoke national security to avoid answering an allegation that it may itself have abused its power?

The Adani-Hindenburg proceedings brought the sealed cover problem into another sensitive area: a judicial conclusion on allegations involving a powerful corporate group, where the public could not independently examine the entire regulatory record.

The Supreme Court declined to transfer the investigation to an independent SIT or another agency and largely left the matter with SEBI, while also considering the report of the expert committee it had constituted. The Court's judgment ultimately found no basis to order a separate investigation.

The issue is not that every regulatory document must be thrown open to the public. The issue is how far public confidence can extend, when the evidentiary material underlying a judicial conclusion cannot itself be examined. A court may be satisfied by what regulators place before it; the public has to accept that assessment on trust.

That is where MediaOne matters. If the evidence remains hidden, the public is left with a conclusion it cannot independently scrutinise.

Vantara raises a different question: what happens when the Court relies on a confidential investigation to reject serious allegations against a powerful private organisation; and then keeps that investigation report in a sealed cover?

Vantara, the animal welfare and conservation initiative associated with the Reliance group, faced allegations concerning the acquisition and housing of animals, compliance with wildlife laws and the manner in which animals had been brought to its facilities. The Supreme Court appointed a Special Investigation Team to examine the allegations. The SIT submitted its report to the Court, which subsequently accepted its conclusions and found no basis for continuing the proceedings. The issue here is not whether Vantara was guilty; the Court found no wrongdoing. The question is whether the public should be able to know what the investigation found and why the allegations were rejected.

If the allegations were unfounded, greater transparency about the investigation should strengthen the clean chit, not weaken it. A clean chit based on reasons the public can examine builds confidence. A clean chit based on material kept behind a sealed cover asks the public to trust what it cannot see. The question, therefore, is simple: was the sealed cover protecting genuinely sensitive information, or was it also protecting the powerful from public scrutiny?

Sealed covers are not inherently wrong. But secrecy cannot be automatic. The Court must ask four simple questions: Is the information genuinely confidential? Is secrecy really necessary? Can the same purpose be achieved by redaction or a summary? And does secrecy deny the other side or the public a fair chance to examine the Court's reasoning?

The Court must distinguish between protecting a secret and protecting a decision from scrutiny. The first may sometimes be necessary. The second should never be.

The real problem is not the sealed cover itself. It is what happens when secrecy becomes an excuse or, worse, a habit. Once a report goes into the envelope, the public is simply expected to accept the Court's conclusion without knowing what was inside.

Black Money, Rafale, Pegasus, Adani, Vantara, IPL Spot Fixing, the NRC and the Farm Laws have already shown how easily sealed covers become part of India's judicial landscape. Each came with a different justification. Each left the public asking the same question: what were we not allowed to see?

The story is still unfolding. In the Ram Mandir donation theft case, the Supreme Court has directed the SIT to carry the investigation to its logical conclusion while submitting periodic status reports in sealed covers to the Court.

The same shadow now hangs over the Jantar Mantar March investigation. If its findings too disappear into sealed covers, another politically sensitive inquiry will end with the public being asked to trust a conclusion without seeing the material that produced it.

A sealed cover should, therefore, be the exception, not the rule. The question is simple: was it protecting something that genuinely needed protection—or someone from scrutiny? If it is the latter, it is no longer a shield for justice. It has become a shield from justice.

Jitendra Mohananey is a practising advocate.