Is a WhatsApp Chat Admissible in an Indian Court? What the Case Law Actually Says

Yes, a WhatsApp chat can be admitted as evidence in an Indian court - but it isn't self-proving just because it looks authentic on a screen or in a PDF export. Like any other electronic record offered as secondary evidence, it has to clear the certification requirement Indian courts have applied consistently since 2014.

In Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer (2014), the Supreme Court held that Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 is a complete code governing the admissibility of electronic records, and that secondary electronic evidence - a printout, a screenshot, an exported chat log - is inadmissible unless accompanied by a certificate meeting Section 65B(4)'s requirements. Producing the original device itself, rather than a copy, is treated differently.

Section 65B has since been succeeded by Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA), which carries forward the same basic certificate structure - see our companion piece on the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling on Section 63(4) BSA for how that requirement is being applied today.

This is the case advocates should actually know cold. Decided on 14 July 2020, it reaffirmed that a Section 65B(4) certificate is mandatory for secondary electronic evidence, resolving inconsistent lower-court practice on the point. The one narrow exception the Court preserved: if the original electronic device itself is produced before the court and its owner gives evidence, no certificate is required - because at that point the record isn't secondary evidence anymore.

This case shows what the certificate requirement looks like when it isn't met. In a commercial dispute, one side produced a WhatsApp message allegedly showing an admission of a payment obligation, without the underlying device or a compliant certificate. A2Z's counsel disputed the message's authenticity outright, arguing it had been forged or fabricated.

The Supreme Court declined to treat the unauthenticated message as reliable proof, observing generally that digital messages can be created or altered with relative ease absent proper verification. It's worth being precise about what this case does and doesn't stand for: it isn't a blanket rule that WhatsApp messages are always inadmissible - it's what happens to a specific, contested, uncertified message in a specific commercial dispute. A properly certified chat, or one where the device itself was produced, is a different situation entirely.

If there's any chance a WhatsApp record might later matter as evidence - a client's instruction, a fee-agreement confirmation, a document acknowledgment - capture it in a way that preserves a certifiable chain: retain the original account/device rather than relying solely on a forwarded screenshot, and know in advance who at the firm (or which qualified expert, per the Section 63(4) BSA ruling) could sign a certificate if it's ever needed.

See our companion article on running client communication through WhatsApp at the firm level for the operational side of this - the evidentiary question here is a reason to get that structure right, not a reason to avoid WhatsApp as a channel.