When benches start undoing benches

At first glance, the Supreme Court’s recent judgement in Sk. Md. Anisur Rahaman v State of West Bengal looks like a routine order in a bail matter from West Bengal. However, buried in the latter part of the decision is an unusually candid institutional reflection: a two-judge Bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and A.G. Masih painfully observes recent instances of benches overturning earlier verdicts of the Court, and warns that this trend threatens the very idea of finality enshrined in Article 141 of the Constitution.

Change in composition encourages parties to “take a chance”

The case arises from the 2019 murder of a political rival in Purba Medinipur, West Bengal. Rahaman, the principal accused, has been in custody for six years as the case wound its way through a convoluted sequence of trial-court proceedings, writ petitions in the Calcutta High Court, a transfer petition in the Supreme Court, and repeated bail applications.

In March 2023, the Supreme Court transferred the trial to a sessions court in Kolkata, directed the appointment of a Special Public Prosecutor, and— significantly—ordered that the accused should not be granted bail till completion of trial except by the High Court. When bail was subsequently denied by the Calcutta High Court, Rahaman filed a special leave petition to challenge the order. His petition was dismissed in December 2023. It was only on 3 January 2025 that another Supreme Court bench granted him bail, but on tight terms: Rahaman had to remain in Kolkata for the duration of the trial.

Authored by Justice Datta, the November 2025 Judgement deals with two fresh applications: Rahaman’s plea to relax the territorial condition and a counter-application by the deceased’s brother seeking cancellation of bail altogether. The Bench ultimately refused both requests. It found that the territorial restriction was the very basis on which liberty was granted and held that no change in circumstance would justify modification.  At the same time, it declined cancellation of bail on grounds of insufficient material to demonstrate misuse of liberty by Rahaman.

It is while addressing the plea for modification that the Judgement turns sharply inward. It notes that an earlier application for relaxation had already been rejected by the original bail Bench led by Justice A.S. Oka, and that the new application was filed a few months after he demitted office. The Court described the move as an attempt to “take a chance” because of the changed composition. In its view, the attempt is emblematic of a larger tendency: litigants returning to the Supreme Court after an adverse verdict, hoping that a differently constituted bench will be more sympathetic.

Taking note of a troubling pattern of verdicts being overturned by subsequent benches within the top court, the Judgement then tied this concern directly to Article 141. On the Datta–Masih reading, the object of Article 141 is that once a Bench settles a point of law in the course of deciding a concrete dispute, the controversy should come to rest. It emphasised that the pronouncement must be treated as final as “a further round of challenge” would undermine the Court’s authority.

The Bench warned that if matters that are res integra are routinely reopened merely because a “later different view appears to be better”, then the consistency of legal interpretation would be sacrificed. The Court invoked Justice Robert Jackson’s famous aphorism in Brown v Allen—“we are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final”—to argue that finality is not a judicial privilege but a structural necessity to prevent endless litigation and protect public confidence in the system.

The Judgement then moved to the internal discipline expected of coordinate benches. It noted that judicial discipline, propriety and comity demand that a subsequent bench defer to an earlier view, unless that view is so grossly erroneous on the face of the record that it warrants reconsideration. In such cases, the Court’s own institutional mechanisms of review or curative jurisdiction may be invoked. 

Notably, in Rupa Ashok Hurra v Ashok Hurra, a Constitution Bench crafted the narrow device of a curative petition to address egregious miscarriages of justice even after dismissal of a review petition. However, it confined such intervention to exceptional cases and to a specially screened process.

The message in Anisur Rahaman is that dissatisfaction with an earlier verdict must be channelled into established tracks. The Bench is troubled not by the existence of mechanisms to correct error, but by the normalisation of re-litigation through fresh petitions or disguised applications timed to coincide with changes in bench composition. The Court’s acknowledgment that overturning a prior verdict “does not necessarily mean that justice is better served” is a rare admission that institutional legitimacy is not just about reaching the substantively “right” decision, but also about adhering to a stable and predictable decision-making architecture.

Recent roll-backs

These remarks sit uneasily against the backdrop of recent instances of the Court revisiting its own orders in high-profile public law matters, including environmental and animal-welfare litigation.  The Anisur Rahaman observations come close on the heels of modifications in the stray-dogs litigation and in the Vanashakti matter on post-facto environmental clearances. While the Judgement does not specifically mention these cases, its timing ensures that it will be read as part of an ongoing institutional conversation on how far, and how often, the court should revisit its own paths.

For the Bar, the Judgement is a warning against increasingly sophisticated forms of bench-hunting. The Court is clearly signalling that attempts to manoeuvre around adverse orders by waiting out a judge’s retirement, or by repackaging old grievances as new issues before a differently composed bench will be viewed as an abuse of process. For the Bench, particularly those dealing with “modification” or “clarification” pleas, the decision offers a vocabulary of restraint. By foregrounding finality, Article 141, and comity among coordinate benches, the Court is trying to insulate its precedents from being chipped away in an ad hoc, case-specific fashion.

At the same time, Anisur Rahaman is not an absolutist manifesto against change. The Judgement recognises that there may be situations where a previous view is palpably wrong and must be revisited. It accepts that rights such as freedom of movement can justify a more flexible application of finality in appropriate cases but it insists that such departures must be pursued through structured devices.

The decision is less about the fate of one accused and more about the Supreme Court’s self-image. The anguished tone—including the admission that the judges themselves are part of the very institution they are criticising—makes the Judgement stand out in a docket crowded with bail orders. By refusing to walk the path of casually reopening settled orders, the Bench is trying to reclaim a thicker, more demanding understanding of precedent and finality. Whether future benches internalize that message or treat Anisur Rahaman as yet another view that can be improved upon, will be a telling test of how seriously the Court takes its own warning.