The May-June 2026 cycle in Indian GST and indirect-tax law has produced three threads running in parallel — the s.16(2)(c) constitutional ferment now sitting before the Supreme Court, the operational aftermath of the September 2025 rate-rationalisation in the High Courts, and the migration of anti-profiteering jurisdiction from the dissolved NAA to the GSTAT Principal Bench.
Across two engagements separated by four years, the Supreme Court has held the Tribunals Reforms architecture introduced by the Union to be inconsistent with the constitutional protection of judicial independence. In July 2021, a three-judge bench struck down provisions of the Tribunals Reforms (Rationalisation and Conditions of Service) Ordinance, 2021 by 2:1. In November 2025, a two-judge bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai held that the Tribunals Reform Act, 2021 was unconstitutional and inconsistent with the basic structure. A digest of both engagements, the doctrinal frame, and the tribunal-independence architecture they leave.
The May 2026 cycle in tax law has produced one of the most consequential indirect-tax rulings of the calendar year — the Supreme Court's affirmation of 28 per cent GST on online gaming on full face value in *DGGI v. Gameskraft Technologies* — alongside the first full compliance cycle of the Income-tax Act 2025, the GSTAT 30 June 2026 backlog deadline, the GST 2.0 dual-rate regime in its first full fiscal year, and the practitioner fallout from the *Tiger Global* GAAR ruling of 15 January 2026. Read together, the cycle discloses the doctrinal and administrative architecture within which tax practice now operates.
The GST Appellate Tribunal was statutorily provided for in 2017 but operationally inert for nearly eight years. The notification of the GSTAT (Procedure) Rules, 2025 on 24 April 2025 — followed by GSTAT becoming operational from September 2025 — has produced an institutional architecture that the GST framework had been missing since inception. The 30 June 2026 special backlog cutoff is the most urgent practitioner item. A digest of the Rules, the operational architecture, and the timeline practitioners must be tracking.