Compelling parties to file their written statements while they are trying to make peace, Justice Subramonium Prasad of the Delhi High Court observed on 1 July 2026, would mean “swimming against the tide favouring mediation.”[i] That line comes from Vedpal Singh v Satishpal, and it captures a question Indian civil procedure has never fully settled: while two parties are in mediation, does the clock for filing a written statement keep running, or does it pause?
The stakes are far from academic. Under Chapter VII of the Delhi High Court (Original Side) Rules, 2018 (“DHC(OS) Rules”), a defendant has 30 days to file a written statement, extendable by a further 90 days on a condonation application, for an outer limit of 120 days.[ii] Miss that window, and the written statement simply cannot go on record. The rule exists precisely because Indian civil litigation has a long history of written statements arriving years late, so Chapter VII, like its cousin under the Commercial Courts Act[iii], was built to leave little room for drift. In Vedpal Singh, the parties spent about four months in mediation before talks broke down, and the defendants filed their written statement within days of the Mediation Report. The Joint Registrar excluded the mediation period entirely and condoned the rest. The plaintiff’s chamber appeal against that order is what brought the question to Justice Prasad, and what he has now sent to a larger Bench.[iv]
One line of authority treats the 120 days as sacrosanct, no exceptions. In Ram Sarup Lugani v Nirmal Lugani, a Division Bench held that Chapter VII leaves no power to condone delay beyond the outer limit.[v] A Single Judge applied this in Harjyot Singh v Manpreet Kaur: ongoing settlement talks can justify condoning delay within the 90-day discretionary window, but they cannot stop the clock altogether, so a written statement filed after 120 days is simply too late, however sincere the mediation.[vi] A Division Bench affirmed this in Amit Tara v Deepak Tara, holding that the 120-day ceiling cannot be breached on any ground, mediation included.[vii]
A second line disagrees, not about the ceiling itself, but about what counts towards it. Building on an older commercial-suit precedent, this view treats genuine mediation time as falling outside the 120 days altogether, excluded rather than merely condoned. Justice Prasad’s own 2025 decision in Bharat Singh v Karan Singh took this route, reasoning that forcing pleadings mid-mediation is itself an adversarial act that defeats the purpose Section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (“CPC”) asks courts to serve.[viii] A Division Bench affirmed that reasoning soon after in Sangeeta Rai Sandhu v Charanjit Sandhu.[ix] That, structurally, is the real reason the question landed before Justice Prasad again: two Division Benches of the same High Court, Amit Tara and Sangeeta Rai Sandhu, now say opposite things, and only a larger Bench can fix that.
Look closely, though, and the two lines are not really arguing about the same question. Condonation asks whether there was sufficient cause for a delay that indisputably happened, and it operates inside a fixed outer boundary. Exclusion asks a prior question: was there any delay at all during the mediation window? Frame it that way, and Ram Sarup Lugani’s bar on condoning delay beyond 120 days never really comes into play, because the mediation period is treated as never having counted in the first place. Bharat Singh makes exactly this move: it agrees the 120-day period is “sacrosanct,” and distinguishes Ram Sarup Lugani on the ground that the case never asks whether the clock should stop running during mediation at all.[x] That is a coherent distinction, not a sleight of hand. But left unchecked, it can also produce a longer effective runway than the sacrosanct line ever intended, since nothing about exclusion caps how long a mediation can drag on before it fails.
The exclusion line’s deeper premise, that filing a written statement while mediation is underway is itself an adversarial act working against Section 89, deserves closer scrutiny than it has so far received. The Code’s own architecture cuts the other way. Order X Rule 1A of the CPC, the provision that actually operationalises Section 89, directs a court to steer parties toward mediation only after admissions and denials have been recorded, a stage that by definition follows the written statement.[xi] The sequence the Code contemplates is pleadings first, settlement conversation second, precisely so a mediator and the parties know what is genuinely in dispute before attempting to resolve it. Referring parties to mediation before any written statement exists, as happened in both Bharat Singh and Vedpal Singh, is the departure from that design, not the norm it protects. None of this makes early referral wrong; parties are free to attempt settlement whenever they are willing, and courts have good reason to accommodate that. But it does mean that describing a written statement as an act that would make a court swim against the tide favouring mediation borrows more rhetorical force than structural support from the Code itself. A written statement is disclosure, not escalation, and disclosure is usually what makes a settlement conversation informed rather than a guessing exercise.
There is a pointed irony worth sitting with, too. Justice Prasad sat on the Division Bench that decided Ram Sarup Lugani in 2020. It is his own opinion in Bharat Singh, five years later, that broke from the line flowing out of that judgment, without engaging the Division Bench in Amit Tara that had meanwhile reaffirmed it. None of this makes the reference in Vedpal Singh improper. A judge candidly registering doubt about a position he once helped shape, and sending a genuine Division Bench conflict upward instead of picking a winner by fiat, is arguably the system working exactly as it should, and Justice Prasad is admirably transparent about where his own sympathies lie even as he refers the question onward. But it does mean the authoritative pronouncement everyone is waiting for will have to reckon with reasoning that traces back, in part, to the very Bench now being asked to settle it.
There is also a useful comparison sitting just outside Chapter VII. It helps to walk through it in the order it actually happened. In 2005, the Supreme Court in Kailash v Nanhku read the Code of Civil Procedure’s 90-day outer limit for written statements as directory, not mandatory, so a court could still accept a late written statement if the circumstances justified it[xii]. That stayed the position for ordinary civil suits for the next decade. Then, in 2015, the Commercial Courts Act wrote a stricter version of the same 30-plus-90 structure specifically for commercial suits, with no obvious room for discretion built in. Three years later, in 2018, Chapter VII of the DHC(OS) Rules set up an identical structure for suits filed on the Delhi High Court’s Original Side. In 2019, the Supreme Court confirmed just how strict the commercial version really was. In SCG Contracts (India) v KS Chamankar Infrastructure, it held that once 120 days pass in a commercial suit, the written statement is gone[xiii]. The following year, in 2020, a Division Bench answered the same question for Chapter VII in Ram Sarup Lugani, and reached the same answer[xiv]. The 120-day limit was mandatory, with no discretion left once it ran out. Original Side suits are not commercial suits, but from that point on, the two were governed by the same rigid logic.
That is exactly the position the exclusion line is now trying to unsettle. In 2025, Bharat Singh tried to pull Chapter VII back toward the same flexibility Kailash had given ordinary suits two decades earlier, and Sangeeta Rai Sandhu did the same soon after. Neither could attack the 120-day limit directly, because Ram Sarup Lugani had already closed off the argument that it is merely directory. So both took a sideways route instead. They argued that time spent in genuine mediation should never have counted against the 120 days in the first place, which reaches a similar practical result without actually contradicting that earlier ruling.
This sideways route has only worked for Chapter VII, and there is a clear reason why. For commercial suits, the Supreme Court had already shut this door in SCG Contracts itself, the same 2019 case discussed a moment ago. For Chapter VII, it has never been asked the same question, and so no equivalent ruling exists at all. That gap in the case law, not any real difference between the two kinds of suits, is the only reason Chapter VII now looks so different from the commercial rule it once matched.
That gap is worth taking seriously, not brushing past. Parliament built the Commercial Courts Act to be the strictest regime of all, because it judged high-value commercial suits between represented, well-funded parties to be the disputes most in need of speed. If Chapter VII ends up more forgiving than that regime purely because the Supreme Court happened to rule on one and not the other, the priority Parliament actually intended gets flipped. A defendant in a suit governed by Chapter VII could end up with real extra time simply by entering mediation, time a defendant in a Commercial Division suit would never get under what is structurally the same rule. It is tempting to explain that away by saying ordinary litigants need more room than commercial ones, but that defence does not really fit here. A suit only ends up governed by Chapter VII, on the Delhi High Court’s Original Side, after clearing the High Court’s own pecuniary threshold, currently set above ₹2 crore[xv]. That means many of these litigants are just as well-funded as the commercial parties the Act was written for. If the more forgiving treatment is going to hold up, it needs a real justification, not just the accident of which regime reached the Supreme Court first.
The cleanest way through may be what Bharat Singh and Sangeeta Rai Sandhu already point toward without quite spelling out: making exclusion conditional on a factual finding of genuine, good-faith engagement, not a bare reference to the Mediation Centre. That would answer the weaponisation worry without forcing parties who are sincerely negotiating to draft an adversarial pleading at the same time, which is really what the exclusion line is trying to avoid. It would also let courts reward the kind of mediation India’s policy establishment keeps asking for, without handing defendants a free-standing route around a rule the High Court itself has called sacrosanct.
That proposal is not self-executing, and it is worth being honest about why. Mediation confidentiality, now codified in the Mediation Act, 2023, protects more than the substance of what was said; on a fair reading it also shields the reasons a mediation failed and how each side conducted themselves within it.[xvi] What typically reaches the court is thinner: that a mediation was referred, when it started, and when it ended without agreement, the bare procedural trail already visible in these very cases. That gives a Joint Registrar dates, not sincerity, and sincerity is exactly what a genuine-engagement test asks to be weighed. Handing that judgment to a Registrar’s office, rather than a judge, risks turning every contested exclusion claim into its own satellite dispute, fought on affidavits about how hard each side really tried, using evidence the confidentiality regime was never designed to produce. If the larger Bench chooses conditional exclusion, the harder task will be building a test that works from the bare procedural record, not one that quietly assumes a fuller record will be available.
My own view is that the exclusion line is right, but only in its conditional form, not the unconditional one that risks becoming a loophole for indefinite delay. Rule 4’s language is genuinely emphatic, and Ram Sarup Lugani is right that “but not thereafter” should mean what it says. But a period during which a court has itself deferred the filing, as happened in Bharat Singh, is not delay in any ordinary sense of the word; there is nothing to condone because the clock was never asked to run in the first place. Treating that interval as time drawn down from a fixed allowance, to be forgiven later at a court’s discretion, mistakes the court’s own order for the defendant’s default.
Whichever way the larger Bench ultimately rules, uniformity will matter almost as much as which answer it gives. Joint Registrars process these applications daily, and litigants deserve to know, before they walk into mediation, whether doing so buys them extra time or simply defers a deadline that keeps ticking regardless. Given how often Original Side suits in Delhi get referred to mediation, this is not a minor procedural footnote. It is a question about what mediation actually costs a defendant, and for now, the honest answer still depends on which Bench you draw.
[i]Vedpal Singh v Satishpal & Ors 2026 LiveLaw (Del) 612 (Delhi HC, 1 July 2026); Prashant Jha, ‘Should mediation period be excluded in deadline for filing written statement? Delhi HC refers issue to larger bench’ (Bar and Bench, 3 July 2026).
[ii]Delhi High Court (Original Side) Rules 2018, ch VII, r 4.
[iii] Code of Civil Procedure 1908, Order VIII r 1, proviso, as substituted by the Commercial Courts Act 2015, s 16 and sch.
[iv]Vedpal Singh (n 1).
[v]Ram Sarup Lugani v Nirmal Lugani 2020 SCC OnLine Del 1353 (DB).
[vi]Harjyot Singh v Manpreet Kaur 2021 SCC OnLine Del 2629.
[vii]Amit Tara v Deepak Tara (Delhi HC, 2024) (DB), noted in ‘Whether Time Spent In Mediation Be Excluded While Computing Limitation For Filing Written Statement? Delhi High Court Larger Bench To Decide’ (LiveLaw, 3 July 2026).
[viii]Bharat Singh v Karan Singh, 2025 SCC OnLine Del 691, [16]–[17], [29].
[ix]Sangeeta Rai Sandhu v Charanjit Sandhu, 2025 SCC OnLine Del 5541 (DB).
[x]Bharat Singh (n 8) [16], [22]–[23].
[xi]Code of Civil Procedure 1908, s 89, Order X r 1A.
[xii] Kailash v Nanhku (2005) 4 SCC 480
[xiii] SCG Contracts (India) Pvt Ltd v KS Chamankar Infrastructure Pvt Ltd (2019) 12 SCC 210.
[xiv] Ram Sarup Lugani (n 5).
[xv] Delhi High Court Act 1966, s 5(2), as amended by the Delhi High Court (Amendment) Act 2015.
[xvi]Mediation Act 2023, s 22.
Author(s)
Smritee Sah
Student of DSNLU, Visakhapatnam