Two Supreme Court rulings, decided less than a year apart, show both edges of the same rule at once. In Ramesh Chand (D) Thr. Lrs. v. Suresh Chand and Anr., decided 1 September 2025, the Court held that a will's execution cannot be proved without examining at least one attesting witness — full stop, no exceptions for undisputed family successions. In R. Veronica & Anr. v. Rudrayani Devaki (D) Through Lrs. S. Satha Kumar & Ors., 2026 INSC 703, decided 14 July 2026, the Court held the opposite result for a registered sale deed — no attesting witness needs to be called at all, because the law never required that document to be attested in the first place. Section 67 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) is the single provision generating both outcomes, and understanding why it cuts both ways is the key to using it correctly.
67. Proof of execution of document required by law to be attested. If a document is required by law to be attested, it shall not be used as evidence until one attesting witness at least has been called for the purpose of proving its execution, if there be an attesting witness alive, and subject to the process of the Court and capable of giving evidence: Provided that it shall not be necessary to call an attesting witness in proof of the execution of any document, not being a will, which has been registered in accordance with the provisions of the Indian Registration Act, 1908, unless its execution by the person by whom it purports to have been executed is specifically denied.
Section 67 carries forward Section 68 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 without any change in wording — it remains, in substance, the 1872 rule the Supreme Court has now applied twice in barely a year. Read in full, the section has two working parts that are easy to conflate but must be kept separate: a strict main rule, and a proviso that carves an exception out of it for a specific, limited category of documents.
Ramesh Chand tests the main rule at its strictest. The High Court had reasoned that examining an attesting witness was really only necessary where legal heirs were actively disputing a will among themselves — and since this dispute did not pit heir against heir in that way, the requirement could be relaxed. The Supreme Court, per Justices Aravind Kumar and Sandeep Mehta, rejected that reasoning outright: Section 68 IEA (Section 67 BSA) "makes it mandatory" to examine at least one attesting witness of a will, and the mandate does not bend based on who is contesting the will or why. A will's proof, in other words, is never made easier just because nobody happens to be fighting over the inheritance.
R. Veronica tests the proviso from the opposite direction. The dispute involved a registered sale deed, and the losing party argued that because the deed happened to carry marginal or attesting witnesses on its face, Section 68 IEA's attestation-proof requirements applied and had not been satisfied. The Supreme Court, per Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, disagreed: a sale deed is not a document the law requires to be attested at all — the presence of witness signatures on the deed does not itself trigger Section 68, because the section's opening words only bite when attestation is legally mandatory in the first place. Since a sale deed falls outside that category, the entire section, proviso included, is simply irrelevant to it — the deed could be proved like any other document, without needing to call the marginal witnesses.
| Document | Attestation legally required? | Attesting witness needed to prove it? |
|---|---|---|
| Will (registered or not) | Yes | Yes, always — per Ramesh Chand v. Suresh Chand, 2025 |
| Registered gift or mortgage deed, execution not denied | Yes | No — registration proviso applies |
| Registered sale deed | No | No — Section 67 does not apply at all, per R. Veronica, 2026 |
The distinction R. Veronica draws matters enormously in practice, because it is easy to assume the presence of attesting witnesses on a document means the attestation-proof machinery automatically applies. It does not. The threshold question is always whether some other law — the Indian Succession Act for wills, the Transfer of Property Act for gifts and mortgages — actually made attestation a legal requirement for that specific document. A sale deed carries no such requirement under the Transfer of Property Act; witnesses signing it are, legally speaking, surplus to requirements, however routine the practice of including them may be.
Section 67 also has to be read together with a separate provision, already addressed earlier in this Part, dealing with documents that are attested but not legally required to be — the flip side of the same classification exercise this section depends on. Getting that initial classification right, whether a given document falls inside or outside the category of "required by law to be attested," decides which regime governs its proof from the outset, before any of Section 67's finer distinctions about registration or specific denial even come into play.
Key Takeaways
- Unchanged from IEA 68: Section 67 carries the rule forward verbatim, including its proviso.
- Wills are absolute: Ramesh Chand v. Suresh Chand (2025) confirms at least one attesting witness must always be examined, with no exception for undisputed successions.
- Sale deeds fall outside the section entirely: R. Veronica v. Rudrayani Devaki, 2026 INSC 703, holds Section 67 simply does not apply where the law never required the document to be attested.
- Registration proviso is conditional, not absolute: it removes the attesting-witness requirement for non-will documents only until execution is specifically denied.
- Classification comes first: whether a document is legally required to be attested at all must be settled before any of this section's registration or denial rules become relevant.
Section 67 rewards precision and punishes assumption. A propounder who assumes a will's proof can be relaxed because nobody disputes it will find, per Ramesh Chand, that the mandate has no such flexibility. A litigant who assumes a sale deed's marginal witnesses must be called will find, per R. Veronica, that the section never applied to that document at all. Getting the classification right at the outset is not a technicality — it decides the entire shape of the proof that follows.