The Supreme Court on Tuesday reserved its judgment on a dispute concerning the admissibility of evidence at an advanced stage of a long-pending commercial suit, after hearing extensive submissions by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and Senior Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

The case concerns the exclusion of portions of a witness’s examination-in-chief in light of earlier Supreme Court orders that had disallowed reliance on internal correspondence and internal discussions within the parties. The principal issue before the Bench was whether those earlier directions were confined to excluding evidence relating to such intra-party communications, or whether they also prohibited a witness from leading direct oral evidence based on personal knowledge of meetings and negotiations.

Senior Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi argued that the witness was deposing to facts personally seen and experienced and that such testimony constituted direct oral evidence admissible under Section 60 of the Indian Evidence Act. He submitted that the earlier orders had excluded only evidence pertaining to internal communications and meetings within the parties, and not the testimony of a witness recounting events he had personally witnessed. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, on the other hand, contended that permitting the proposed testimony would effectively allow the parties to introduce, through oral evidence, matters that had already been excluded by previous judicial orders, thereby achieving indirectly what could not be done directly.

After hearing the parties at length, the Bench reserved judgment.