Article 226
5 articles
A Reply Handed Over at the Hearing Must Be Read: Orissa High Court Sets Aside Section 74 Order That Treated a Manually Filed Reply as No Reply
A Division Bench of the Orissa High Court has quashed a Section 74 order for 2019-20 that proceeded as if no reply existed, although the Superintendent had signed an acknowledgment of the contractor's written reply. The Court held that Rule 142(4) of the CGST Rules does not make electronic filing a condition of being heard, remitted the matter, and left the limitation and jurisdiction questions open.
13 min readTwo and a Half Years Too Late: Telangana High Court Declines to Examine a Section 62 Best-Judgment Assessment on the Ground of Delay
A taxpayer challenged a best-judgment GST assessment order two and a half years after it was passed, arguing that filing his return afterwards meant the order stood automatically withdrawn. The Telangana High Court never reached that argument — it dismissed the petition for delay, exposing a gap between the taxpayer's account of why he could not act sooner and the actual timeline on record.
13 min read629 Noticees, One Order: Delhi High Court Declines a GST Writ Challenge, Distinguishing ASP Traders on Natural Justice
When a single Order-in-Original runs to 1,881 pages and names 629 firms and individuals in an alleged fake-invoicing racket, does an individual noticee's claim that its reply was never considered open the door to a writ petition? The Delhi High Court says no — and distinguishes the Supreme Court's ASP Traders on the ground that a mass adjudication order is not the same as an unreasoned order against a single assessee.
14 min readSupreme Court: A Lessee Cannot Use Article 226 to Reopen a Title Dispute Its Landlord Already Lost
Deciding an appeal arising from a decades-old encroachment dispute over land in Hyderabad, the Supreme Court held that lessees claiming through a trust could not invoke Article 226 to protect their possession once the trust itself — after losing before the Division Bench and withdrawing its own Special Leave Petition with liberty only to file a fresh suit — was barred from doing so. The lessees' writ petitions, filed in their own names soon after the trust's remedy was confined to a civil suit, were themselves an attempt to keep the writ route open by other means.
12 min readNo Membership, No Plot: Supreme Court Closes a Seven-Decade Cooperative Housing Society Allotment Dispute
A claim to a cooperative society plot that began in 1952 has finally ended, seventy-four years and one prior Supreme Court round later — decided not on the equities of land allotment but on how far a writ court may go in re-examining a tribunal's finding of fact.
14 min read