View of the Supreme Court. File | Photo credit: PTI
In 2025, the Supreme Court “clarified,” “modified,” and “rescinded” its rulings on a variety of issues ranging from stray dogs to retrospective environmental reviews to pollution standards in response to public outcry or pressure from authorities.
Recent months have even seen the court respond to a presidential reference against the grain of its own judgment delivered in the Tamil Nadu Governor’s case.
The shift in positions on crucial issues has come in a year in which the nation has seen three Chief Justices of India, even as addiction has continued to rise and is pegged at an all-time high of 92,118 on December 31, 2025.
When asked once whether the Supreme Court itself was adding to its already heavy burden of dependence on time and re-examining its own decisions, Chief Justice Surya Kant brushed off the question by pointing to cases where the court had re-examined judgments as old as 30 years.
Meanwhile, the Chief Justice has assured that the court will meet even “in the middle of the night” for the sake of justice. The Vacation Benches met three times during the winter vacation to hear urgent cases, one of which was suo motu to reserve its own judgment in the Aravalli case.
The Aravalli case
In a suo motu case, the Aravalli Vacation Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant prima facie conceded that the court’s November 20 judgment based on the government panel’s definition of the Aravalli range “failed to expressly clarify certain critical issues”.
The court acknowledged that it revived the case after “significant outrage among environmentalists”. Leaving the November judgment delivered by the Coordinated Bench “alone”, the Bench agreed that “public disapproval and criticism appears to have arisen from the perceived ambiguity and lack of clarity in certain terms and directions issued by this Court”.
This is not the first time that the Court, the final arbiter of the law and the Constitution, has re-examined its own decisions arrived at by the minute application of the judicial mind. In May 2025, the court ruled that the Center’s granting of ex-post facto or retrospective environmental clearances (ECs) to construction projects and structures was a “gross illegality” and anathema.
Months later, in November, a majority judgment of another bench headed by then Chief Justice (now retired) BR Gavai recalled the May judgment on the grounds that demolition of huge structures and projects approved with retroactive permission would only cause further damage to the environment and lead to extensive financial losses.
Marathon hearings
That year saw marathon hearings held by a five-judge Bench to respond to a presidential reference on whether the governors and president should stick to the timeline for dealing with state laws despite objections raised by Tamil Nadu and Kerala on their very maintainability.
The states argued that the President’s issues had already been definitively resolved by the Division Bench in the April 8 judgment in the Tamil Nadu Governor’s case and the reference was essentially an appeal or a disguise to “disrupt the findings and nullify the effect of the judgment”.
However, the five-judge panel justified the Referee’s amusement by saying that the April judgment had led to a “state of doubt or confusion” that may hinder the smooth functioning of the Constitution. But the “confusion” is doubled when the court speaks with two voices on the same matter – the judgment and the opinion of the presidential reference. Contributing to the problem is the court’s agreement with the government’s position that it does not want to overturn the judgment of April 8, and the Legacy was only meant to “clarify the constitutional principles of future governance.”
In December, even as the AQI readings reached “severe” in Delhi, the apex court modified its August 12, 2025 order and directed that no enforcement action should be taken against owners of BS-IV and later emissions vehicles on the grounds that they were 10 years old (in case of diesel engine) and 15 years old (in case of petrol engine).
In the case of stray dogs, the courts were in sight. On August 11, the division bench ordered that the animals be captured and not released “under any circumstances”. After protests by animal welfare groups, a three-judge Bench took up the case days later on August 22 to find the earlier order “too harsh”. He ordered that stray dogs be captured, sterilized, wormed and “released back into the same area from which they were picked up.”
On November 7, the court reversed its position by ordering municipal authorities to “immediately remove” stray canines found in the premises of educational institutions, hospitals, sports grounds, bus stops and railway stations to “designated shelters” and “not to release them back to the same place from which they were picked up”.
Published – 31 Dec 2025 21:13 IST
