CLAT PG Current Affairs — 28 July 2026

The Supreme Court on July 27, 2026, in State of Andhra Pradesh v. Suda Suresh Veera Venkata Naga Raju (2026 LiveLaw SC 722), interpreted Section 38 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. A bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta held that while an arrested person has a right to meet an advocate of choice during interrogation, the advocate cannot remain continuously present throughout the entire interrogation session.

Section 38 of the BNSS is the statutory successor to the right recognised under Article 22(1) of the Constitution, which guarantees an arrested person the right to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner of their choice. The BNSS translated this constitutional guarantee into a specific procedural right during police interrogation. The crucial question this case addressed was: does 'meet' mean a brief consultation or a continuous presence?

The Andhra Pradesh High Court had imposed a condition requiring two advocates to be nominated at the prison, with at least one present at any given point during interrogation. The State challenged this as obstructing custodial investigation — a legitimate law enforcement concern, since interrogation effectiveness depends on privacy and directness.

The Supreme Court struck a careful balance. It held that 'meet' under Section 38 implies access and consultation rights, not a right to have counsel audibly or visually supervising the entire interrogation. However, the Court did not entirely exclude the advocate — it modified the High Court's condition to allow the advocate to remain within the interrogation site where they can see the accused, but not necessarily hear or intervene.

This distinction matters enormously for CLAT PG: it separates the right to consult (constitutionally rooted) from the right to supervise interrogation (not contemplated by statute). The judgment also links to S.187(2) BNSS, which the Court noted allows police custody beyond the first 15 days — expanding the interrogation window itself.

The Supreme Court on July 27, 2026, set aside an Andhra Pradesh High Court condition barring police custody extension beyond the first fifteen days of remand. A bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta held that Section 187(2) BNSS, unlike erstwhile Section 167 CrPC, allows police custody in parts, aggregating not more than fifteen days, within the first forty or sixty days of total permissible detention. The case arose from alleged custodial death of Gade Sai Krishna in Vijayawada.

This judgment marks a significant interpretive shift in remand law under India's new criminal procedure framework. Under the old Section 167 CrPC, police custody of an accused was strictly confined to the first fifteen days of remand—once that window closed, further police custody was unavailable regardless of investigation needs. This created rigidity: if fresh leads emerged on day 20, investigators had lost their custodial interrogation window permanently.

Section 187(2) and (3) BNSS deliberately enlarges this window. Police custody—aggregating not more than fifteen days—can now be sought in parts throughout the first forty days (for offences punishable with imprisonment up to ten years) or sixty days (for more serious offences) of the total permissible detention period. This is a legislative policy choice to empower investigators when fresh disclosures, forensic leads, or geographic factors make later custodial interrogation necessary.

The Court also clarified ancillary issues: advocate presence throughout interrogation violates Section 38 BNSS (which only guarantees the right to consult, not continuous presence); interrogation need not be confined to Central Prison; and videography, while retained as a safeguard, need not cover transit phases. Courts and Magistrates exercising supervisory jurisdiction cannot impose conditions that effectively nullify the statutory window Parliament created. For CLAT PG aspirants, this judgment sits at the intersection of statutory interpretation, legislative intent, and fundamental rights balancing—core competencies the exam tests through passage-based MCQs.

The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Amendment) Bill, 2023, passed both Houses of Parliament in September 2023, providing one-third reservation for women in Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies. However, the reservation is contingent on a delimitation exercise following the next Census. The Bill amends Articles 330A and 332A. It does not extend reservation to Rajya Sabha or State Legislative Councils. The law is formally titled the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam.

The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, 2023 is a landmark constitutional amendment that has been debated since the 1990s. The original Women's Reservation Bill was first introduced in 1996 and lapsed multiple times across successive Lok Sabhas due to political deadlock — primarily over demands for sub-quotas for OBC and Muslim women within the reserved seats. The 2023 Bill was introduced in the first session of the newly inaugurated Parliament building and passed with near-unanimous support.

The key constitutional mechanism is rotation: reserved constituencies will rotate after each delimitation exercise, preventing any single constituency from being permanently reserved. The reservation applies to seats already reserved for SCs and STs, meaning one-third of SC/ST seats will also go to women of those communities.

The critical political catch is the delimitation trigger. Reservation will not come into effect until after the next Census is conducted and a fresh delimitation is completed — effectively deferring actual implementation to 2029 or beyond, since the Census was delayed post-2021. Critics argue this built-in delay is a political compromise, not a constitutional necessity. For exam purposes, the distinction between what the Bill does immediately versus what requires future action is the most tested analytical dimension.

The Supreme Court on July 27, 2025, held that a moratorium under Section 14 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, against a corporate debtor does not bar consumer complaints filed against the company's promoters or directors before the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission. The moratorium protects the corporate entity alone, not its officers in personal capacity. The ruling reinforces personal liability of promoters in real estate disputes under the Consumer Protection Act.

When a company enters the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process under the IBC, Section 14 imposes a moratorium — a legal freeze — on all proceedings against the corporate debtor. The intent is to protect the company's assets during resolution, giving the Resolution Professional space to revive it. However, promoters and directors are legally distinct from the company as a corporate entity. They cannot use the company's moratorium as a personal shield against consumer complaints filed against them individually.

This distinction matters enormously in Indian real estate. Homebuyers who paid crores for flats in projects by builders like Amrapali or Supertech were left stranded when those companies entered insolvency. If the moratorium extended to promoters, these buyers would have no forum for redress during the entire CIRP period — which can last years. The Supreme Court's ruling ensures that the NCDRC and State CDRCs remain open against promoters and directors, preserving the homebuyer's right to seek compensation or possession orders.

The legal principle at play is the corporate veil — the company is a juristic person separate from its human officers. The moratorium protects the 'person' that is the company, not the flesh-and-blood persons who ran it. This ruling aligns with the Supreme Court's earlier trend of lifting the corporate veil in consumer matters where promoters personally benefited from buyers' trust and money. For CLAT PG aspirants, this tests the intersection of IBC moratorium provisions, consumer protection law, and the doctrine of separate corporate personality.

In Selvi v. State of Karnataka (2010), a three-judge Supreme Court bench held that polygraph, narcoanalysis, and brain mapping tests cannot be administered without the subject's explicit consent. Forced administration violates Article 20(3) — protection against self-incrimination — and Article 21 — right to life and personal liberty. Voluntary results are admissible as corroborative evidence only. The National Human Rights Commission had earlier issued guidelines in 2000 restricting these tests.

Polygraph measures physiological responses (blood pressure, respiration) to detect deception. Narcoanalysis involves injecting sodium pentothal ('truth serum') to induce a semi-conscious state where subjects are less inhibited. Brain mapping (BEAP — Brain Electrical Activation Profile) maps neural responses to crime-related stimuli to detect concealed knowledge. All three were widely used by Indian investigative agencies before the Supreme Court's intervention.

The Selvi judgment is constitutionally pivotal for three reasons. First, it expands Article 20(3) beyond formal legal proceedings to cover any compelled self-incrimination — closing the loophole that agencies used to conduct tests outside courtrooms. Second, it roots bodily and mental autonomy within Article 21, establishing that the right to privacy includes the right not to have one's mind involuntarily probed. Third, it distinguishes between testimonial acts (protected) and physical evidence like fingerprints or blood samples (not protected), drawing a line that directly informs subsequent privacy jurisprudence including Justice Puttaswamy (2017).

For CLAT PG candidates, this case is an anchor judgment: examiners extract passage-based hypotheticals where a character is subjected to narcoanalysis without consent and ask whether a constitutional violation has occurred, which article is breached, and whether the evidence gathered would be admissible. The consent-admissibility distinction is the most-tested fault line.

The Supreme Court is examining whether a pre-cognizance hearing is mandatory before Special Courts take cognizance of complaints filed by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office under the Companies Act, 2013. The case arose from Vivo India's challenge to a Punjab and Haryana High Court ruling that held such hearings are not compulsory. The Supreme Court has sought responses from relevant parties. The issue turns on procedural safeguards available to accused entities before judicial cognizance is formally taken.

SFIO is a statutory multi-disciplinary investigation agency under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, established under Section 211 of the Companies Act, 2013. When SFIO files a complaint, it goes before Special Courts designated under Section 435 of the Act. The core question now before the Supreme Court is procedural: must the accused be given a hearing before the Special Court decides to take cognizance of the SFIO complaint?

This matters enormously in corporate fraud prosecution. Cognizance is the first judicial act — once taken, the accused is formally brought into a criminal process. If pre-cognizance hearings are not required, an entity like Vivo India faces criminal proceedings without any prior opportunity to contest the complaint's very initiation. This asymmetry is what Vivo challenged.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court held such hearings are not mandatory, citing the general criminal procedure principle that cognizance is an ex-parte judicial act. The Supreme Court's ruling will clarify whether the Companies Act's special statutory scheme carves out a higher procedural protection than the CrPC or BNSS default.

For CLAT PG, this sits at the intersection of corporate law, criminal procedure, and constitutional due process — a classic area where examiners test application of statutory provisions to novel facts rather than pure rote recall.

India's Foreigners' Tribunals adjudicate citizenship disputes, especially in Assam under the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964. A LiveLaw analysis argues that tribunals err by demanding single documentary proof rather than holistically weighing the entire evidence chain. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that citizenship cannot be reduced to one document; the totality-of-evidence standard, rooted in cases like Sarbananda Sonowal and subsequent NRC litigation, governs these quasi-judicial proceedings.

Foreigners' Tribunals occupy a unique and contested space in Indian constitutional law. Created by executive order under the Foreigners Act, 1946, they are quasi-judicial bodies that determine whether a person referred to them is a 'foreigner' under Section 2(a) of that Act. Critically, the burden of proof under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act is reversed: once a person is referred to the Tribunal, they must prove they are not a foreigner — a significant departure from ordinary evidence law.

The document-centric approach that Tribunals have historically followed has produced injustice: people with genuine links to India have been declared foreigners because they lacked a specific paper (say, a voter list entry or a land deed) even when other credible evidence existed. The LiveLaw piece and the broader legal discourse argue that tribunals must apply a holistic appreciation of evidence — considering oral testimony, family trees, school records, electoral rolls, and land documents together, rather than treating any single document as a litmus test.

The Supreme Court in Md. Rahim Ali v. State of Assam and other NRC-related cases has signalled that evidence must be assessed cumulatively. The passport controversy referenced in the news — where passport issuance or denial became a proxy for citizenship determination — illustrates the same fallacy: one document is not citizenship itself. The correct legal standard is the preponderance of evidence read as a whole, sensitive to the socio-economic context of rural Assam where formal documents were historically inaccessible.

The Delhi High Court ruled that neither copyright owners nor Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can unilaterally designate a website as 'rogue.' The Court established a judicial procedure: copyright holders may seek temporary blocking of mirror websites, but such blocking must be followed by judicial scrutiny to confirm rogue status. The judgment addresses the growing menace of piracy websites reappearing under new domain names, balancing copyright protection with due process and ISP liability frameworks under Indian law.

This judgment is significant because it plugs a critical procedural gap in India's copyright enforcement architecture. Prior to this ruling, rights holders and ISPs were, in practice, deciding inter se which websites qualified as 'rogue' — a determination that carries serious legal consequences including indefinite blocking. The Court found this extra-judicial exercise of power impermissible.

The mechanism devised is a two-stage process: first, a court may grant a dynamic injunction permitting temporary blocking of mirror or redirect websites associated with an already-blocked infringing site; second, judicial scrutiny must follow to formally confirm whether the blocked site is indeed a rogue website. This borrows from the concept of 'dynamic injunctions' developed in UTV Software Communication v. 1337X (2019, Delhi HC), which allowed blocking of piracy sites without repeatedly filing fresh suits for each new mirror.

The ruling has ISP liability implications under the Information Technology Act, 2000 — specifically the safe harbour provisions under Section 79 — and under the Copyright Act, 1957. ISPs are protected from liability only when they act pursuant to a court or government order, not on private instructions from copyright holders. By mandating judicial gatekeeping, the Court reinforces that website blocking is a quasi-penal measure requiring independent adjudication, not private enforcement. This is directly relevant to CLAT PG passage-based questions that test application of legal principles to hypothetical scenarios.