Income Tax · Topic
Case Law & Landmark Judgments
Landmark income-tax judgments explained — what the Supreme Court, High Courts and ITAT actually held, the ratio that binds, and how the ruling changes a return or an assessment in practice.
Search the full judgments on BharatTax.net ↗Every commentary here links to the judgment it discusses. BharatTax.net carries the full reported text, searchable by section, court, bench and citation.
Articles · 8
- 01Malabar Industrial: the twin conditions, and what Explanation 2 did to themEvery section 263 notice turns on the same fight — was there no inquiry, or merely an inquiry the Commissioner would have conducted differently. Here is the test, the 2015 amendment that shifted it, and what the Tribunal is actually doing with both.
- 02Katiji: the most-cited case in Indian tax litigation that is not about taxThe ITAT condones delay by invoking a 1987 land acquisition judgment, often in a single sentence. Here is what it actually decided, what the Tribunal does with it, and the three Supreme Court decisions that stop it being a blank cheque.
- 03Three cases decide whether your appeal is heard at allA citation study of 292,668 tribunal judgments found that the authorities the ITAT relies on most are not about tax. They are about admission — and two of the three are older than most of the assessments they are cited in.
- 04Manjunatha Cotton: the penalty notice that does not say what you are accused ofConcealment and furnishing inaccurate particulars are two different charges. A notice that does not say which is levelled has been held to vitiate the whole proceeding — a point now carried by a Full Bench, and migrating to section 270A.
- 05Reliance Utilities: when your own funds cover the investment, the interest disallowance goesIf interest-free funds exceed the investments they are said to have financed, a presumption arises that the investments came from those funds. The Supreme Court has approved the reasoning three times — and there are four situations where it has nothing to operate on.
- 06Section 14A and Rule 8D: what survives the own funds argumentWinning the own funds point deletes the interest disallowance. It does not delete the disallowance. Benches are correcting first appellate orders that assume otherwise — and the rule those orders apply is not the one most practitioners learned.
- 07Vegetable Products: the rule that favours the assessee, and the Constitution Bench that carved out exemptionsTwo reasonable views, take the one that helps the assessee. It is the most quoted sentence in Indian tax argument. Since 2018 there has been a significant exception, and it lands on precisely the provisions most assessees are arguing about.
- 08Kabul Chawla after Abhisar Buildwell: you win the section 153A point, and then they reopenThe Supreme Court settled the incriminating-material question in 2023, and it settled it in the assessee’s favour. It also expressly saved the Department’s power to reopen the same years under section 147. Both halves matter.