On 13 December 2000, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justice D.P. Mohapatra authoring, with Chief Justice B.N. Kirpal on the panel — set out the foundational architecture for repudiation of a life-insurance policy under the second part of Section 45 of the Insurance Act 1938. The judgment held that after the two-year incontestability window, an insurer can repudiate only by establishing cumulatively that the impugned statement was on a material matter, that the suppression was fraudulent, and that the policyholder knew at the time of making the statement that it was false. The burden is a heavy one; mere inaccuracy is not enough.
On 24 April 2019, a two-judge bench of Justices Dr D.Y. Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta restored an insurer's repudiation of a life policy because the proposer had failed to disclose an existing Rs.11 lakh Max New York Life policy taken nine weeks earlier. The judgment, authored by Chandrachud J, holds that the existence of prior policies is a material fact bearing on aggregate risk concentration; because death and repudiation both fell within the two-year window, the pre-2015 second proviso to Section 45 of the Insurance Act 1938 had not yet attached, and the insurer needed only to establish materiality — not fraud.
On 27 July 2022, a three-judge bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar upheld substantially all the contested provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 — the arrest power under Section 19, the provisional attachment power under Section 5, the search-and-seizure architecture under Section 17, the reverse-burden provision under Section 24, and the twin bail conditions under Section 45. The judgment also held that an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) is not equivalent to an FIR and need not be supplied to the accused. A digest of the holdings, the doctrinal contributions, and the review now pending.