Karan Bir Singh Sidhu, IAS (Retd.), former Special Chief Secretary, Punjab, writes on the intersection of constitutional probity, due process, and democratic supremacy.
At the heart of Amarinder Singh v. Income Tax Department & Anr. (with the connected petitions of his son Raninder Singh) lay a straightforward but significant question: when tax information has come to India from France under a sovereign exchange-of-information article, can another investigative arm of the Union—the Enforcement Directorate (ED)—access the same material once it sits on a judicial record? Today, on 3 September 2025, Justice Tribhuvan Dahiya answered in the affirmative in a detailed 16-page judgment, while ring-fencing the material from public dissemination. That carefully calibrated “yes, but” both vindicates institutional comity and protects individual privacy.
What the High Court was asked to decide
The Income Tax Department (ITD) had filed complaints alleging that Captain Amarinder Singh, the former Chief Minister of Punjab and now a senior leader in the BJP, and his son Raninder Singh were beneficiaries of foreign assets, with material sourced via the Indo-French Double Taxation Avoidance Convention (DTAC), specifically Article 28 (the exchange-of-information clause). While those complaints were pending before the Magistrate, the ED sought inspection of the documents on the judicial file, explaining that the subject matter overlapped with its own remit (the ED had invoked FEMA, 1999 in its application). The Magistrate allowed inspection; a revision failed; and the High Court was finally petioned by Captain Amarinder Singh and his son to quash those orders on the ground that Article 28 bars disclosure to “strangers.”
The legal fulcrum: Article 28 and open justice
The petitioners anchored their resistance in Article 28, which requires that treaty-obtained information be treated as secret and used only for tax purposes, save for disclosure “in public court proceedings or in judicial decisions.” They argued the ED is a stranger to the tax complaint and that circuitous access via the court record would violate the treaty. The Court recited Article 28 and squarely engaged with this secrecy argument.
The Court’s two-step reasoning
Step One: Domestic court-record rules permit limited inspection. The Court relied on Rule 2, Part-C, Chapter 16 of the Punjab & Haryana High Court Rules & Orders (Vol. 4), which allows even a stranger to inspect records of pending cases “for sufficient reasons” to the Court’s satisfaction. That means the threshold question—may the ED inspect?—is answered first by domestic procedural law: yes, if the Court is satisfied. The revisional court had found ED’s reasons sufficient; Justice Dahiya agreed that denying inspection would “create a hurdle in the investigation.”
Step Two: Article 28 is not a brick wall against inter-agency access via courts. Turning to the treaty plane, the Court invoked the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ram Jethmalani & Ors. v. Union of India (2011), which interpreted parallel language (Article 26) to hold there is no absolute bar of secrecy and that information may be disclosed “in public court proceedings or in judicial decisions.” In other words, once information is part of judicial proceedings, the treaty does not foreclose its controlled use within the justice system.
Privacy remains integral—secrecy is not weaponised
The High Court also emphasised the privacy dimension, again consonant with Ram Jethmalani: the State cannot indiscriminately publicise names or banking details absent prima facie wrongdoing; but this privacy shield is not a licence to obstruct lawful investigation within constitutional bounds. That is why Justice Dahiya concludes with a tailored caveat: the ED may inspect and use the material for investigation, but the same shall not be disseminated publicly unless permitted in accordance with law. This preserves confidentiality against public leakage while enabling a statutory probe to proceed.
A proportionate, “best of both worlds” outcome
Seen holistically, the order achieves an elegant balance:
Institutional comity: It avoids siloed governance where one wing amasses information and another is forced to reinvent the wheel. Inter-agency collaboration—mediated by the court’s control of its record—improves investigative coherence.
Rule-bound transparency: Access is not casual; it is channelled through court-supervised inspection on a showing of sufficient reasons. This protects against fishing expeditions.
Privacy and reputational safeguards: No open-ended publicity; no trial by leak. The non-dissemination condition honours both treaty expectations and constitutional privacy.
On the “treaty bar” argument: why it had to fail
Treaties are honoured within our constitutional order; they are not designed to kneecap it. Ram Jethmalani makes plain that secrecy clauses exist to prevent indiscriminate public exposure, not to frustrate judicial proceedings or law-enforcement activities conducted under judicial supervision. The petitioners’ reading would have created a perverse outcome: information formally placed before a Magistrate—thereby entering the justice system—would still be immune to use by another domestic law-enforcement agency addressing overlapping illegality. Justice Dahiya rightly declined to constitutionalise a wall that the treaty does not erect.
The inspection rule matters more than it looks
Some may see the reliance on the High Court’s inspection rule as a procedural aside. It is more than that. By situating ED’s access within an existing rule of court administration—one that requires “sufficient reasons” and is subject to the presiding judge’s control—the judgment avoids creating a free-standing, agency-to-agency disclosure entitlement. The gateway remains judicial. The discretion remains with the Court. And the standard remains reason-based. That is a constitutional virtue.
Implications for ED, ITD, and cross-border financial probes
Practically, this order removes a recurrent obstacle in high-stakes financial investigations with a foreign-information component. Where the ITD has already tendered treaty material to a court, the ED—particularly when proceeding under FEMA (as here) and potentially in parallel PMLA contexts elsewhere—may, with leave of the court and on sufficient reasons, inspect and rely on the same corpus rather than starting from zero. That efficiency is not trivial; in complex cases involving layered offshore structures, time and paper-trails matter. This decision lets the State move faster without loosening privacy or publicity controls.
Politics will swirl; the law keeps its keel
No one should be naïve about the political heat that attends any proceeding involving prominent public figures. The order will likely intensify scrutiny on Captain Amarinder Singh and his son Raninder Singh. But the Court does not try the politics; it tends the law. By upholding the ED’s right to inspect—and by forbidding public dissemination absent legal sanction—the Court has insulated the process from both partisan weaponisation and privacy overreach. The takeaway is not that “secrecy lost” or “ED won,” but that the rule of law recalibrated the line between secrecy and scrutiny in a manner faithful to precedent and procedure.
What critics might say—and why they would be wrong
A familiar critique will be that permitting ED to piggyback on treaty material will chill future cooperation by foreign partners. But that conflates public disclosure (which the judgment continues to restrain) with judicially-controlled use within domestic proceedings—something contemplated in the treaty text itself (“public court proceedings or judicial decisions”) and blesséd by the Supreme Court. Foreign competent authorities, no less than ours, appreciate that law-enforcement is not theatre; it is a chain of custody culminating in adjudication. This order respects that chain.
The Court’s operative directions—clear, limited, and lawful
The petitions were dismissed. The ED was permitted to inspect the record of the pending complaints and to access the information for investigation. And crucially, the Court appended the privacy guardrail: no public dissemination unless permitted by law. That concise triad—dismissal, inspection, non-disclosure—captures the judgment’s spirit: enable the investigation; constrain the publicity.
A word on fairness to the individuals concerned
For those named, the judgment neither pronounces guilt nor licenses public vilification. The privacy caution in the concluding paragraph is explicit, and the Ram Jethmalani thread—no disclosure of names absent prima facie wrongdoing—runs through the reasoning. If, after “properly conducted investigations,” material establishes such wrongdoing, citizens’ right to be informed arises; until then, reputational rights are respected. That is the right constitutional instinct.
Conclusion: A sound bridge between two public interests
This is, in the end, a judgment about balance. It refuses to let secrecy morph into impunity; it refuses to let transparency degenerate into spectacle. By locating ED’s access within the Court’s inspection framework and aligning treaty interpretation with Ram Jethmalani, Justice Dahiya has crafted a workable, principled bridge between the State’s duty to investigate complex financial wrongdoing and the individual’s right to privacy and fair reputation.
One hopes the agencies now walk across that bridge with diligence and restraint: mining the material for leads, coordinating sensibly rather than grandstanding, and taking the matter to its logical legal conclusion—in court, on evidence, within the Constitution. That is how confidence in our institutions is earned, and how the law keeps faith with the public it serves.