The rule against bias, carried by the maxim nemo judex in causa sua, disqualifies anyone with an interest in a matter from deciding it. Indian courts sort the kinds of bias into pecuniary, personal, subject-matter, policy and obstinacy bias.
In a 2026 ruling the Supreme Court set aside an employee’s dismissal because the officer who took the final decision was the same officer against whom he had already twice recorded a lack of faith. In National Bal Bhawan v. Khazan Chand, 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 363, the Court held that such an authority must step aside, and it directed a different disciplinary authority to reconsider the inquiry report within three months. The rule therefore governs who may decide, not only how the hearing is run.
This article sets out what the rule against bias requires, the kinds of bias Indian courts recognise, and when an objection built on it actually succeeds.
Whether the rule against bias helps a particular litigant usually turns on who signed the order rather than on what the order said, so a worked example has to start with the signature. Take a state housing board employee facing a charge of misconduct, where the complaint that set the inquiry going came from the deputy director of the board.
The inquiry officer is someone else entirely, and the report travels up to the deputy director because he is the disciplinary authority for that grade. The employee writes to the board before the report is considered, saying that the person who complained cannot also be the person who decides the charge.
That objection succeeds, and it succeeds for two reasons that run through the whole doctrine. The deputy director has an interest of his own in a finding that vindicates his complaint, which is precisely the interest the rule exists to keep out of the decision. The employee also raised the point before the decision rather than after losing, which is what separates a live objection from a waived one.
What does the rule against bias require of a decision-maker?
The rule against bias requires that the person deciding a matter has no interest of their own in its outcome and no connection with a party that a fair-minded observer would think could tilt the decision. The maxim nemo judex in causa sua, that nobody may be a judge in his own cause, states the first half of that requirement. The second half is the proposition that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. Together they mean a decision can fall because of how the decision-maker’s position looks, without anyone suggesting that he actually did anything wrong.
The case the rule is usually traced to shows how far that reaches. In Dimes v. Proprietors of the Grand Junction Canal, (1852) 3 HLC 759, the Lord Chancellor affirmed a decree in favour of a canal company in which he held shares, and the House of Lords set the decree aside. Nobody suggested he had been influenced, and the evidence was that he had forgotten he owned the shares.
In India the rule has no express home in the Constitution. The Supreme Court reads the principles of natural justice, of which the rule against bias is one limb and the right to be heard the other, into Articles 14 and 21. That footing matters in practice, because it makes a bias objection a constitutional point rather than a procedural complaint.
What a successful objection destroys is the decision, not the decision-maker’s good faith. In Ranjit Thakur v. Union of India, (1987) 4 SCC 611, a signalman was tried by a summary court martial presided over by the very officer whose order he was accused of disobeying, and the Supreme Court quashed the proceedings and the sentence and directed reinstatement with all monetary and service benefits. He did not have to prove a corrupt motive, and he did not have to show that another officer would have acquitted him.
The rule against bias reaches administrative decisions because the Supreme Court abandoned the old line between judicial and administrative functions in A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India, (1969) 2 SCC 262. Until then natural justice was treated as a constraint on bodies acting judicially, and an authority that could label its own function administrative largely escaped it. Kraipak closed that escape route.
The case concerned selections to the Indian Forest Service from officers of the Jammu and Kashmir forest department. One member of the Selection Board, who was then the Acting Chief Conservator of Forests, was himself a candidate for selection. He withdrew from the Board’s deliberations when his own name was taken up, but he sat and took part when the claims of his rivals were considered. The Supreme Court quashed the selections.
The reasoning is what carries the case beyond its own facts. Withdrawing from his own item cured nothing, because his presence while the competing candidates were assessed could itself influence how the other members judged them. The Court treated that as a real likelihood of bias, and held that the rules of natural justice applied to the Board even though its function was administrative.
Since Kraipak the rule has been applied wherever an authority decides something that affects rights. Departmental inquiries, promotion and selection boards, decisions on sanction to prosecute, the constitution of tribunals and the appointment of arbitrators all sit inside it, and the same principles had already been carried into service determinations under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 in Union of India v. P.K. Roy (1968). The iPleaders piece on the application of natural justice in administrative proceedings covers the wider field, while this article stays with the bias limb.
One qualification belongs here rather than later, because it disposes of a great many weak objections. The rule attaches to the person or body that decides, so an interested official who only investigates, or who gathers material for somebody else to act on, is not disqualified on that ground alone. It bites when the interested person holds the decision.
The five kinds of bias Indian courts recognise
Indian courts sort the kinds of bias into five: pecuniary bias, personal bias, subject-matter or official bias, policy or departmental bias, and bias arising from judicial obstinacy. The sorting is not academic, because the kind alleged decides how much the objector has to establish. A financial interest is close to self-executing, while a general policy view is not disqualifying at all.
That spread exists because the five kinds differ in how directly the interest touches the decision. Money riding on the outcome is measurable and needs no inference. A prior opinion is a matter of degree, and a court has to separate the official who holds a view from the official who has closed his mind.
Two things hold across all five. The interest must be the decision-maker’s own rather than one imputed to the institution at large, and it must bear on the matter actually being decided. A judge who owns bank shares is not disqualified from every banking dispute, only from one in which that bank is a party or stands to gain by the result.
Pecuniary and personal bias disqualify most readily because in both the interest belongs to the decision-maker and is usually visible on the record. Where the financial stake is direct, the courts have not weighed how large it was, and Dimes is the source of that approach.
The clearest Indian application is J. Mohapatra & Co. v. State of Orissa, (1984) 4 SCC 103. Members of the committee assessing books for purchase by state libraries were themselves authors of books that had been submitted, and each withdrew only when his own book came up. The Supreme Court held that authors “stand to benefit financially in several ways by getting either royalty from publishers or by direct sales”, which tainted the exercise. It also made the standard explicit, holding that what matters is not the actual bias but the possibility of it.
Personal bias covers relationship, earlier professional connection and hostility. In Manak Lal v. Dr. Prem Chand, AIR 1957 SC 425, the chairman of the tribunal hearing a misconduct charge under the Bar Councils Act, 1926 had earlier filed a vakalatnama for the complainant and argued a proceeding for him under Section 145 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898. The Supreme Court held that the tribunal’s constitution suffered from a serious infirmity, because the test “always is and must be whether a litigant could reasonably apprehend that a bias attributable to a member of the tribunal might have operated against him in the final decision”. Ranjit Thakur is the hostility version of the same idea.
Relationship cases have produced the one settled compromise in this area. In Ashok Kumar Yadav v. State of Haryana, (1985) 4 SCC 417, the Supreme Court held that where a close relative of a member of a Public Service Commission appears for interview, that member “must withdraw from participation in the interview of that candidate and must not take part in any discussion in regard to the merits of that candidate”, and the marks given should not even be disclosed to him. He does not withdraw from the selection as a whole, because nobody outside the Commission can be substituted in his place.
Official, policy and obstinacy bias are harder to draw a line around because the interest is institutional or intellectual rather than personal. The question in each is whether the decision-maker’s place in the machinery, or his settled view, has made an open mind impossible. The two Gullapalli decisions, nine months apart on the same nationalisation scheme, mark out where that line runs.
In Gullapalli Nageswara Rao v. Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation, AIR 1959 SC 308, the Secretary of the transport department heard the objections to a road transport nationalisation scheme that the department itself had published, and the Chief Minister approved the scheme on the material the Secretary gathered. The Supreme Court struck that procedure down. After fresh notices the Chief Minister himself heard the objectors and the corporation, and in Gullapalli Nageswara Rao v. State of Andhra Pradesh, AIR 1959 SC 1376 the Court upheld the scheme. The distinction was structural rather than personal, because “the Secretary of a department is its head i.e., he is part of the department”, whereas a Minister is responsible for the department’s business without being part of it.
Policy bias is the mildest form and rarely succeeds on its own. An officer who administers a statute is expected to have views about how it works, and having applied a policy before is not a disqualification. What disqualifies is a mind closed to the case in hand.
Where the institution itself is the interested party, the answer has been to move the decision rather than to excuse the interest. In M.P. Special Police Establishment v. State of M.P., (2004) 8 SCC 788, the Council of Ministers refused sanction to prosecute two of its own Ministers on a Lokayukta report, and the Governor granted sanction against that advice. The Supreme Court upheld the Governor’s sanction, holding that a Council of Ministers deciding whether its own colleagues should stand trial is deciding its own cause, so the Governor may act in his own discretion (the full case analysis sets out the Lokayukta findings).
The fifth kind was added comparatively late. In State of W.B. v. Shivananda Pathak, (1998) 5 SCC 513, the Supreme Court treated judicial obstinacy as a species of bias, describing the judge who has formed a concluded view in earlier proceedings and holds to it after a superior court has overruled him. Judicial discipline requires the overruled judge to submit to the higher decision, and a refusal to do so disqualifies him as surely as a personal interest would.
When an objection under the rule against bias succeeds
An objection under the rule against bias succeeds when a fair-minded and informed person, knowing the facts, would see a real danger that the decision-maker could not decide impartially, and when the objection was taken as soon as those facts were known. Both halves are necessary, and a strong bias point raised late is worth less than a modest one raised early.
Courts have used three formulations, and it helps to know which one is being quoted at you. The reasonable suspicion test asks whether a reasonable person would suspect bias; the real likelihood test asks whether such a person would think bias likely; the real danger formulation, preferred by the House of Lords in R v. Gough, shifts the enquiry from probability to possibility. Ranjit Thakur states the Indian working test at paragraph 6, that “the test of real likelihood of bias is whether a reasonable person, in possession of relevant information, would have thought that bias was likely”.
What that observer needs is material rather than adjectives. In Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam Ltd. v. Girja Shankar Pant, (2001) 1 SCC 182, the Supreme Court held that a mere apprehension of bias will not do and that there must be cogent material on the record. General statements of ill-will fail at that threshold.
Timing is what kills most otherwise sound objections. Manak Lal is the warning, because the Court found the infirmity in the tribunal’s constitution made out and still dismissed the appeal with costs: the appellant knew the chairman had acted for his opponent, said nothing, and raised the point only once the report went against him. Waiver, the Court said, “can be inferred only if and after it is shown that the party knew about the relevant facts and was aware of his right to take the objection”. Justice P.D. Dinakaran v. Judges Inquiry Committee, (2011) 8 SCC 380, which surveys all three formulations and settles on the fair-minded and informed observer, treats delay the same way.
The doctrine of necessity permits an interested decision-maker to act only where there is nobody else who can lawfully act at all. It turns on the absence of an alternative, not on inconvenience or delay. Ashok Kumar Yadav is the genuine case for it, because a Public Service Commission member cannot be replaced by an outsider and a Commission that lost a member to every related candidate might be unable to function. That is why the Court there required withdrawal from the particular interview instead of the whole selection.
Where an alternative exists the doctrine is refused. In J. Mohapatra the Court pointed out that “there was nothing to prevent those whose books were submitted from pointing out this fact to the State Government so that it could amend its Resolution by appointing a substitute or substitutes”. In Election Commission of India v. Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, (1996) 4 SCC 104, two other Election Commissioners were in office and the Commission could decide by majority, so the Chief Election Commissioner could stand aside and necessity did not arise. The two cases together demand absolute necessity: the authority must show the seat cannot be filled by anyone else.
Parliament has written the rule against bias into statute most fully in arbitration. Section 12(5) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, inserted by the 2015 amendment, makes a person ineligible to be appointed as arbitrator if his relationship with the parties, with counsel, or with the subject matter falls within any category in the Seventh Schedule. Ineligibility follows from the relationship itself, so the objector proves the relationship and nothing more.
The Supreme Court then closed the obvious workaround. In TRF Ltd. v. Energo Engineering Projects Ltd., (2017) 8 SCC 377 it held that a person who is himself ineligible to act as arbitrator cannot nominate one, and in Perkins Eastman Architects DPC v. HSCC (India) Ltd., (2020) 20 SCC 760 it applied that reasoning to a clause letting a disqualified official appoint the sole arbitrator.
A Constitution Bench of five judges took the next step in November 2024. In Central Organisation for Railway Electrification v. ECI-SPIC-SMO-MCML (JV), 2024 INSC 857, the Court held that a clause allowing one party to appoint the sole arbitrator unilaterally, or to curate the panel from which the other side must choose, violates Article 14 in public-private contracts. The rule there no longer works only as a ground for setting an award aside; it controls how the tribunal may be constituted.
Frequently asked questions
Do you have to prove actual bias to get a decision set aside?
No, and that is the point of the rule. The objector shows that a reasonable and informed person, knowing the facts, would have thought bias likely, which is why the decree in Dimes fell even though the judge had forgotten his shareholding.
What is the difference between the reasonable suspicion test and the real likelihood test?
Reasonable suspicion asks whether a reasonable person would suspect bias; real likelihood asks whether such a person would think bias probable, which sets a slightly higher bar. Indian courts have worked with the real likelihood formulation since Ranjit Thakur.
When must a bias objection be raised?
As soon as the party knows the facts that support it, which in practice means in writing before the decision is taken. Manak Lal shows the cost of waiting: the Court accepted that the tribunal was improperly constituted and still dismissed the appeal, because the objection had been waived.
Does the rule against bias apply to administrative and departmental decisions?
It does. Kraipak extended natural justice to administrative action affecting rights, and National Bal Bhawan v. Khazan Chand applied the bias limb in 2026 to a disciplinary authority whom the employee had already accused of bias.
Can a decision-maker with an interest ever decide the matter anyway?
Only under the doctrine of necessity, and only where no one else can lawfully decide. Ashok Kumar Yadav is the accepted example, while J. Mohapatra and Election Commission of India v. Dr. Subramaniam Swamy both refused the plea because a substitute or a majority decision was available.
References
- National Bal Bhawan & Anr. v. Khazan Chand & Ors., 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 363, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 6 April 2026 (disciplinary authority previously accused of bias directed to be substituted).
- A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India, (1969) 2 SCC 262, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 29 April 1969 (natural justice extended to administrative action; Indian Forest Service selections quashed).
- Manak Lal v. Dr. Prem Chand, AIR 1957 SC 425, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 6 February 1957 (test of reasonable apprehension; objection held waived).
- Gullapalli Nageswara Rao v. Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation, AIR 1959 SC 308 and Gullapalli Nageswara Rao v. State of Andhra Pradesh, AIR 1959 SC 1376, Supreme Court of India (Secretary as head of the department contrasted with the Minister).
- J. Mohapatra & Co. v. State of Orissa, (1984) 4 SCC 103, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 10 August 1984 (author-members of a book assessment committee; doctrine of necessity refused).
- Ashok Kumar Yadav v. State of Haryana, (1985) 4 SCC 417, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 10 May 1985 (withdrawal by a Public Service Commission member from a relative’s interview).
- Ranjit Thakur v. Union of India, (1987) 4 SCC 611, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 15 October 1987 (paragraphs 6 and 7; summary court martial quashed).
- Election Commission of India v. Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, (1996) 4 SCC 104, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 23 April 1996 (doctrine of necessity refused where an alternative existed).
- State of W.B. v. Shivananda Pathak, (1998) 5 SCC 513, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 11 February 1998 (judicial obstinacy as a form of bias).
- Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam Ltd. v. Girja Shankar Pant, (2001) 1 SCC 182, Supreme Court of India (cogent material required; mere apprehension insufficient).
- M.P. Special Police Establishment v. State of M.P., (2004) 8 SCC 788, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 5 November 2004 (Governor’s discretion to sanction prosecution of Ministers).
- Justice P.D. Dinakaran v. Judges Inquiry Committee, (2011) 8 SCC 380, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 5 July 2011 (survey of the bias tests; fair-minded and informed observer).
- TRF Ltd. v. Energo Engineering Projects Ltd., (2017) 8 SCC 377 and Perkins Eastman Architects DPC v. HSCC (India) Ltd., (2020) 20 SCC 760, Supreme Court of India (an ineligible person cannot appoint an arbitrator).
- Central Organisation for Railway Electrification v. ECI-SPIC-SMO-MCML (JV), 2024 INSC 857, Supreme Court of India, Constitution Bench judgment dated 8 November 2024 (unilateral appointment clauses violative of Article 14).
- Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (Section 12(5) read with the Fifth and Seventh Schedules, as inserted by the Arbitration and Conciliation (Amendment) Act, 2015).
- Dimes v. Proprietors of the Grand Junction Canal, (1852) 3 HLC 759, House of Lords (pecuniary interest of the Lord Chancellor; decree set aside without any inquiry into influence).
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a qualified advocate before acting on any point discussed here.