On 25 July 2025, GST officers searched the premises of a Delhi firm, Bass Legal LLP, and seized the computer used by one of its advocates, Puneet Batra. The department says Batra’s role went beyond conventional legal advice. Batra’s case is that the machine holds confidential material not only about the company under investigation but about several of his other clients. Whether the state may examine all of it is now before the Supreme Court in Puneet Batra v. Union of India.
On 28 September 2026, a bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu issued notice on Batra’s petition against a Delhi High Court judgment of 18 September 2026 that had upheld the search. The bench stayed the operation of the High Court’s order until the next date of hearing, including its directions on cloning and examination of the seized data. The stay is interim, and the larger question is still open.
The dispute
The Anti-Evasion Branch of the CGST department was investigating a gaming company. The authorisation under Section 67(2) of the CGST Act covered the firm’s premises, and the Delhi High Court’s Division Bench held that the search was validly authorised and that an advocate’s cabin inside those premises did not make it unlawful. It also held that privilege cannot operate as an absolute bar to investigating an advocate’s own conduct where that conduct forms part of the subject matter of the investigation.
That is hard to argue with. The High Court also cautioned that nothing in its judgment allows an unrestricted search of an advocate’s premises or dilutes the protection for genuinely privileged material. Nor did it leave the seized data with the department. Through interim orders of 28 July, 9 September and 13 November 2025, it restrained coercive action, had court-appointed IT officials oversee the cloning of the computer, allowed examination only in the presence of the advocate and his lawyers or forensic expert, and barred the department from opening data of clients unrelated to the company under investigation. The data was later parsed at a forensic laboratory under the same safeguards.
In the Supreme Court, the first question was the obvious one: the department may collect evidence, but how will it separate confidential or privileged material? The department said it could redact and segregate confidential material during the investigation. The bench also questioned the department over the reasons for the search, which had not been disclosed to the petitioner.
Three ideas that should be kept apart
Three ideas are easily run together in this debate. The first is a lawyer’s ethical duty of confidentiality, which covers what a client tells her in the course of the engagement. The second is the evidentiary privilege in Section 132 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA), which protects confidential professional communications, subject to its exceptions. The third is the constitutional right to informational privacy recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India(2017) 10 SCC 1.
They lead to different results. The Supreme Court has said that documents belonging to a client but held by an advocate are not covered by Section 132, and not every confidential document is privileged. But even where an unrelated client’s file is not privileged in the technical sense, taking an entire drive of third-party data raises a separate privacy question, one that turns on necessity, proportionality and the manner of access.
What the Court held eleven months ago
This is not the first time the Court has faced a problem of this kind. In In Re: Summoning Advocates Who Give Legal Opinion or Represent Parties During Investigation of Cases and Related Issues (Suo Motu Writ Petition (Crl.) No. 2 of 2025), a bench led by CJI B.R. Gavai, with Justices K. Vinod Chandran and N.V. Anjaria, held that investigating agencies cannot summon advocates merely because they appeared for or advised an accused. The Court said this infringes the independence of the profession and the rights of advocates and clients under Articles 19(1)(g) and 21.
The directions were specific. An advocate can be summoned only if the matter falls within the exceptions to privilege in Section 132 of the BSA: a communication made to further an illegal purpose, or a fact the advocate observed in the course of his service showing that a crime or fraud has been committed since it began. The summons must specify the facts relied on and needs the prior written approval of an officer not below the rank of Superintendent of Police, who records his satisfaction in writing. It can be challenged before the High Court under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS). And if an officer directs an advocate’s digital device to be produced under Section 94 BNSS, it must be produced only before the jurisdictional court, and examined under court supervision in the presence of counsel and client.
A gap between summons and search
The Court did not insist on prior judicial approval even for summons. It treated recorded reasons, sign-off by a senior officer and High Court review as a sufficient check. But the safeguards it did lay down are specific to advocates, and they deal with summons and production orders. They do not say what happens when officials skip both and arrive with a search authorisation.
Section 67(2) of the CGST Act allows a proper officer, not below the rank of Joint Commissioner, who has reasons to believe that documents, books or things which in his opinion shall be useful for or relevant to proceedings are secreted in any place, to authorise another officer in writing to search and seize them, or to do so himself. Nothing in it is specific to lawyers, and no court is involved at the outset. Section 67(10)still speaks of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, and applies its search and seizure provisions (the equivalent of Section 165 of the Code is now Section 185 of the BNSS), with one change. Where Section 165(5) of the Code sends the record of the officer’s grounds to a Magistrate, the CGST Act reads “Commissioner”. Even under the ordinary Code, a warrantless search is checked only after the event. Here, with the Magistrate replaced by the department’s own Commissioner, even that check stays inside the department.
The safeguards in Batra’s case were built by a careful court after the event. They are not in the statute, and they exist here because the High Court stepped in within days. A lawyer who cannot reach a court quickly, or a search nobody challenges, gets no such protection.
A physical search is a far greater intrusion than a written summons. A summons leaves the data with the lawyer until it is formally produced; a raid carries the storage media away. In my view this raises a serious question under Article 14 of the Constitution: the confidentiality of third-party client communications should not get weaker protection just because the state chose a more intrusive way in. The Supreme Court has not ruled on this, but its questions suggest it is alert to the point.
Who sorts the privileged material?
Under Section 132 of the BSA, privilege belongs to the client, not the lawyer. Even if a lawyer has crossed the line, her other clients have done nothing wrong, and their confidences do not become fair game because of suspicion about their counsel. In Batra’s case, the High Court answered the question of who sorts the material by appointing its own officials. That answer came from judges improvising, not from the law. Left to the statute, the agency that forms the belief and conducts the raid would sort privileged from non-privileged material itself. That sits uneasily with the rule that no one should judge their own cause. Put more plainly, the agency marks its own homework.
Beyond our borders
India is a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 14(3)(b) guarantees a person charged with an offence adequate time and facilities to prepare a defence and to communicate with counsel of his own choosing, and the UN Human Rights Committee, in General Comment No. 32, reads this to require conditions that fully respect the confidentiality of those communications. A tax search may come before any criminal charge, so these principles inform, rather than directly govern, the question here.
The UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers (1990) point the same way. Principle 22 expressly requires governments to respect the confidentiality of lawyer-client communications, and Principle 16 asks them to ensure that lawyers can work without improper interference. Indian courts have long read international norms into fundamental rights where domestic law is silent and the norm is consistent with the Constitution. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) 6 SCC 241, which drew on CEDAW, is the best-known example.
The other side
Enforcement agencies will say that tax and economic offences leave digital trails that can be wiped in hours, and that waiting for court permission risks losing evidence. That is a serious concern. But urgency can justify a quick entry; it cannot justify leaving the sorting of privileged material to the searcher. A search can be swift and still be supervised.
A workable rule
Three safeguards would help. First, where the department’s recorded reasons to believe concern an advocate’s personal involvement, they should be placed before a judicial authority, ideally before the raid and at least promptly after it. The Court did not require this even for a summons, but a search is a bigger step. Second, the agency may secure devices quickly to prevent deletion, but cloning and examination should take place under independent supervision, by a retired judge or a court-appointed forensic expert, before the agency gets any access. The Delhi High Court’s own protocol here, with court-appointed IT officials, counsel present and unrelated data walled off, shows this can be done. It should be written into the law rather than left to the luck of a quick court date. Third, the independent filter should work in two steps: redact communications protected by Section 132, then separate and block access to the data of third-party clients unrelated to the investigation.
People tell their lawyers the truth because they trust it will go no further. A lawyer who breaks the law should answer for it. But investigating one suspect should not expose every client who trusted the same lawyer, and the law should say so before the next search, not after.
The views expressed are personal.