P v. A (2021): Bombay HC's confidentiality guidelines for POSH litigation

A suit arising out of allegations of workplace sexual harassment came before the Bombay High Court styled, deliberately, as P v. A. Rather than treat that anonymisation as a one-off courtesy, Justice G.S. Patel used the occasion to articulate a structured set of confidentiality directions: how such matters should be titled, where orders should be pronounced, what may be uploaded, who may inspect the record, and what the parties, their advocates and the press may say outside the courtroom. The result is the most-cited Indian template for keeping a sexual-harassment proceeding confidential without shutting the courthouse door on the merits.

The facts in brief

The underlying dispute was a civil suit connected to allegations falling within the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. The substance of those allegations is not what makes the decision important, and consistently with the order itself this digest does not reproduce the parties' identities — they appear in the cause-title only by the neutral letters P and A.

What concerned the Court was a structural problem that the merits could not be reached without first solving. Litigation in a constitutional court is, by default, a public act: cause-titles carry names, orders are pronounced in open court, judgments are uploaded to the High Court's website, and the press is free to report. For a POSH matter that default is corrosive. A complainant who comes forward, and equally a respondent who has not been found liable, can be exposed and damaged by the mere fact of being named in a public order — often before anything has been decided. Justice Patel framed the question as how to honour the open-court principle and the statute's confidentiality command at the same time.

The question

Two questions sat behind the order. First, does the POSH Act's confidentiality provision — s.16, which prohibits publication of the contents of a complaint, the conciliation or inquiry proceedings, and the identity and addresses of the complainant, respondent and witnesses — require a court hearing a related proceeding to depart from ordinary open-court practice? Second, if it does, what concrete arrangements give that confidentiality real effect across the lifecycle of a case: the title, the hearing, the pronouncement, the public record, the registry's files, and reporting?

What the Court held

Justice Patel held that the protection of the parties' identities was not an optional indulgence but a necessity in this class of litigation, and that the necessity ran in both directions — toward the complainant and the respondent alike.

From that premise the Court fashioned a working code. Cause-titles were to be anonymised — the matter styled by initials rather than names — and no order was to bear the parties' names, whether in the title or in the body, nor any personally identifiable information such as email addresses or mobile numbers. Orders and judgments were not to be pronounced in open court; they would be delivered privately, in the judge's chambers or in-camera, with only the advocates and litigants present. The Court further directed that such orders not be uploaded to the High Court's website in the ordinary way, that the registry not retain identifying documents in publicly inspectable form, and that the record be kept sealed, with inspection confined to authorised advocates.

The Court coupled these arrangements with a disclosure bar. The parties, their advocates and the witnesses were restrained from disclosing the contents of any order, judgment or filing to the media or on social media without the special leave of the court, and the press itself was required to observe the anonymity conditions. The Court held that all persons, including the media, were required to ensure strict compliance with these conditions of anonymity, and that a breach — including publishing a party's name or identifying information, even if that information was otherwise in the public domain — would amount to contempt of court.

It is important to record what the Court itself later clarified. Some months after the order, the same bench observed that the directions had been "confined to this particular case" — that they were case-specific arrangements rather than a binding, court-wide protocol. P v. A therefore states a persuasive template grounded in the statute, not a rule of universal application; its directions are routinely adopted but are made case by case at the court's discretion.

Analysis

The doctrinal anchor is s.16 of the POSH Act read with the privacy dimension of Article 21. Section 16 imposes confidentiality on the internal machinery of a complaint — the Internal Committee proceedings, the identities and addresses of those involved, the recommendations and the action taken — and forbids their publication. The statute, however, speaks primarily to the workplace and its committees; it does not by its terms tell a civil court how to run a connected suit. P v. A supplies that missing procedural bridge: it carries the legislative confidentiality policy into the conduct of court proceedings, translating a publication bar aimed at the inquiry into concrete directions on titling, pronouncement, the public record and reporting.

The decision sits naturally alongside the broader POSH line. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan established that workplace sexual harassment is a justiciable wrong and laid the foundation that the 2013 Act later codified; Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa pressed the enforcement and compliance side of the statute. Where those decisions concern whether and how the substantive protections operate, P v. A concerns the procedural architecture that lets a complainant invoke them without fresh injury. It also illustrates how courts have read the Act's scope at the margins — as in Siddhesh Satpute v. SBI, where the question was whether a particular setting was even a "workplace" — and how the definitional core of harassment is policed, as in Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A.K. Chopra.

The Court's even-handedness deserves emphasis. By extending anonymity to the respondent as well as the complainant, the order avoids the trap of treating confidentiality as a shield for one side only. That balance is what makes the template durable: it protects a person who has come forward with an allegation and a person against whom an allegation remains unproven, and it does so without converting the proceeding into a secret trial — the merits are still decided, merely not advertised.

Why it matters

For practitioners, P v. A is the practical checklist whenever a sexual-harassment matter reaches court. Counsel should file with an anonymised cause-title from the outset, seek directions for in-camera or in-chambers delivery, ask that identifying documents be sealed and kept off the public record and the website, and obtain express leave before anything is said to the press. The contempt warning is not rhetorical: the order treats publication of a party's name — even a name already circulating publicly — as punishable, which sharply constrains both litigants and reporters.

For organisations, in-house teams and members of Internal Committees, the decision is a reminder that the statute's confidentiality obligation does not lapse when a dispute migrates from the committee room to the courtroom; it follows the matter, and the court will enforce it. And the later clarification that the directions were case-specific is itself instructive — because these protections are sought and granted case by case, a party who wants them must actually ask for them at the threshold rather than assume they apply automatically. The safest course is to treat the P v. A framework as the standard to request and to build into one's pleadings from the first filing.

Related on Valkya

• Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan
• Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa: enforcing the POSH Act
• Siddhesh Satpute v. SBI: when a shared space is not a "workplace"
• Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A.K. Chopra: defining sexual harassment

Sources

• LiveLaw, "No Media Reporting, Public Disclosure Of POSH Case Judgments Without Prior Approval: Bombay High Court Issues Guidelines To Shield Anonymity"
• SCC Online Blog, "POSH | Judgments and Order to be delivered only in Chambers or in-camera, media disclosure forbidden: G.S. Patel, J. issues detailed guidelines"