Secret Rafale documents leaked. The government said: state secret. The court said: show them.

Secret Rafale documents disappeared. The government called them state secrets. Then the Supreme Court asked to see them — and ruled that even stolen files, once they are in the open, can be used in court.

The case pitted the Central Government and Ministry of Defence against petitioners who had produced leaked documents about India's multi-crore Rafale fighter jet deal. At stake was a simple but explosive question: could photocopies of classified files, allegedly removed from the Defence Ministry and published in newspapers, be admitted as evidence in the Supreme Court?

When the documents went missing

A set of secret papers concerning the Rafale deal — a multi-billion dollar contract for 36 fighter jets between India and France — vanished from the Ministry of Defence's custody. Then they appeared in newspaper reports. A political firestorm followed.

Former Union Minister Yashwant Sinha and others filed a review petition in the Supreme Court. Their argument: the deal was riddled with irregularities. To prove it, they wanted to rely on these very documents — the ones the government called stolen state secrets. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was also involved in the larger context of the case.

The government's response was swift and absolute. These are secret documents concerning the affairs of the State. They cannot be shown to the court. They cannot be used as evidence. Period.

The government's shield: Section 123

The government raised a claim of immunity under Section 123 of the Indian Evidence Act — a provision that protects unpublished official records relating to "affairs of the State." In plain terms, this section allows the government to refuse to produce a document in court if its disclosure would harm public interest. The argument was straightforward: the documents were secret, they were stolen, and therefore they were inadmissible.

The petitioners countered: the documents were already in the public domain. Newspapers had published them. Citizens could read them. How could something already out in the open still be a "secret" that the law must protect?

Why the presumption survived

The Supreme Court examined the claim of immunity under Section 123 carefully. The bench observed that such a claim has to be judged on a specific touchstone: whether public interest would actually be jeopardised by disclosing the document. The court also noted a fundamental reality — no law specifically prohibits the placing of secret documents before a court of law to adjudicate legal issues.

More importantly, the court recognised that this was not a routine dispute. The matter involved a complaint against the commission of grave wrong in the highest echelons of power. That required the court to consider the documents' relevance, not just the government's claim of secrecy.

The deciding factor was the status of the documents in the public sphere. The stolen papers of the Rafale fighter jets from the Ministry of Defence were already in the public domain — they were "within the reach and knowledge of the citizens." Once a secret is no longer secret, the logic goes, the government cannot use the law to pretend it still is.

The verdict: show them

The Supreme Court held that the claim of immunity under Section 123 of the Evidence Act raised by the Central Government was not tenable. The documents in question were admissible as evidence. The review petition could therefore be adjudicated on its merits — by taking into account the relevance of those documents.

The court did not say that stealing documents is legal. It did not say that governments should not protect genuine secrets. What it said was narrower and more powerful: once state secrets become public knowledge — even if they were stolen or leaked — the veil of privilege under Section 123 can be lifted. The documents can be used in legal proceedings.

What this means for you

For advocates, this judgment is a reminder that Section 123 is not an automatic shield. The court will look at the document's actual status in the world, not just the government's label. For corporate counsel and founders dealing with sensitive government contracts, the message is clear: if a document is already out in the open, don't assume the government can keep it out of court.

THE PLAY: When opposing a claim of state immunity for a leaked document, first establish that the document is already in the public domain — once the secret is out, the privilege falls.