Resistance to Forensic scrutiny of Will puts Priya Kapur at Centre of Intensifying Inheritance Storm

Mumbai, Nov 19

The Delhi High Court has questioned why late industrialist Sunjay Kapur’s widow Priya Kapur is resisting inspection of what she claims is his original will March 21, 2025, a document that purportedly leaves his personal assets almost entirely to her, sparking a bitter inheritance battle. On November 11, the family feud reached a new pitch, when Sunjay’s first two children Samaira and Kiaan, from his earlier marriage, moved an application before the Joint Registrar seeking to inspect the original will. Rather than facilitating scrutiny, Priya Kapur and co-defendant Shraddha Suri Marwah opposed the request, prompting the Registrar to grant them three weeks to file a formal reply. At a subsequent hearing on November 14, senior counsel Mahesh Jethmalani, appearing for the Plaintiffs, openly questioned why Priya and Suri were “surprisingly objecting” to the inspection of a document they rely upon to claim rights in a multi-billion-rupee estate. The High Court decided to let the Registrar first rule on the inspection plea. The pushback has only strengthened suspicions already swirling around the will’s authenticity. For estate-litigation experts, the refusal to produce an original document in a case where the beneficiary stands to inherit everything is “a classic red flag”. Under Indian jurisprudence, the proposer of a will especially when standing to gain substantially, must remove every shadow of doubt surrounding its execution.

A forensic inspection of the Will is critical. This is because according to the ongoing pleadings, the Will produced by Priya Kapur disinherits Samaira and Kiaan entirely, allocates full control of his assets and Sona Group companies to her, and was allegedly coincidentally executed just months before his death. The children claim the document bears clear marks of fabrication including discrepancies in metadata, inconsistencies in the testator’s address, gender and contradictions with earlier instruments. Their petition points to messages and communication records that they say raise further doubts, fuelling the theory that the March 2025 will is not only suspicious, but possibly engineered to secure rapid control of the estate before competing claims could surface. Given these allegations, the refusal to permit physical forensic inspection of the original Will appears at least in perception, to be more than a mere procedural objection. A lawyer opined that it is a tactical effort to delay or avoid forensic scrutiny that could undermine Priya Kapur’s position entirely.

Indian courts have repeatedly underscored the significance of producing the original will when its validity is challenged. Historically, the Supreme Court has emphasised that when a beneficiary plays an active role in the drafting, custody or production of a will, the onus becomes “proportionately greater”. In multiple judgments, courts have ordered forensic examination of Wills when authenticity is questioned, ranging from handwriting analysis to digital forensics and examination of execution witnesses. In a recent matter involving an Air Force officer’s estate, police arrested two individuals for allegedly forging his will to siphon off assets — a case that hinged on forensic contradictions revealed only after inspection of the “original” document. The precedent is not lost on legal observers following the Kapur case: inspection is the gateway to establishing whether the paper is legitimate at all. “If forensic examination ultimately establishes that the alleged will is fabricated or manipulated, the consequences extend far beyond civil litigation. Forging or knowingly presenting a forged will is a criminal offence under IPC sections 467, 468 and 471, attracting serious penalties including imprisonment,” says a high court lawyer requesting anonymity.

For a beneficiary asserting that a Will is genuine; permitting inspection is ordinarily a straightforward step. That Priya Kapur is resisting this despite the court noting that a Will is a public document, is fuelling perceptions that her legal strategy may be to obstruct, delay, or limit evidentiary examination, according to a legal expert. If the Registrar allows inspection, experts anticipate that the Plaintiffs will seek a full forensic audit of the document’s ink, paper, signatures, metadata and chain of custody. If contradictions emerge, the will could be declared invalid, causing the estate to devolve naturally among Class-I heirs, a scenario in which Priya would receive only a fractional share compared to what the disputed Will grants her.

The legal outcome will shape not only the future of the Kapur estate — estimated to be worth tens of thousands of crores — but also the contours of high-value inheritance disputes in India. If the court permits rigorous scrutiny, the case may set a benchmark for how Indian courts handle Wills produced under suspicious circumstances, especially those benefiting a single party to the exclusion of natural heirs. For now, as the Joint Registrar’s ruling is awaited as a critical turning point in the high profile inheritance dispute, the question is simple: Why is the one person who stands to gain everything resisting a basic inspection of the will?

EoM.