On 7 February 1966, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court (Hidayatullah J. authoring, with Gajendragadkar CJ, Wanchoo, V. Ramaswami and Satyanarayanaraju JJ.) settled the foundational canon of Indian insurance-contract interpretation: the court's task is to interpret the words in which the parties have expressed their contract — not to make a new contract, however reasonable, that the parties have not made themselves. A cover note issued 'subject to the usual conditions of the Society's policies' incorporates the full policy framework, including a termination clause, even before the formal policy issues. The judgment is the strict-construction landmark; supporting principles of uberrimae fidei and contra proferentem read alongside but trace their foundational SC authority to Mithoolal Nayak v. LIC (1962) for the disclosure duty. Sixty years on, every Indian insurance-contract dispute begins from the Chandumull Jain canon.
A 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court — *J.S. Verma, J.* and *K. Jayachandra Reddy, J.* — held in March 1992 that a bank has a general lien on fixed deposit receipts in its possession under *Section 171* of the *Indian Contract Act 1872*, supplemented by the contractual right to set-off, and that an FDR deposited under a covering letter authorising retention 'so long as any amount is due' cannot be attached by a third-party decree-holder ahead of the bank's lien. The judgment distinguished the general lien from the particular lien under *Section 170* and is the foundational authority for the banker-customer set-off architecture in India.