The Bankruptcy of Certainty: The Clean Slate Doctrine

The "clean slate doctrine" is the principle that a successful resolution applicant under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, acquires the corporate debtor free of all claims and liabilities that are not provided for in the court-approved resolution plan. This paper traces the doctrine's conceptual and theoretical foundations, maps the statutory architecture from which courts have derived it, and analyses its progressive judicial elaboration through Essar Steel (2020), Ghanashyam Mishra (2021), Ebix Singapore (2022), and the Supreme Court's 2025 trilogy. The paper aims to unravel four critical knots in the doctrine. The unresolved conflict between Ghanashyam Mishra and Rainbow Papers on the treatment of government dues as "secured" claims; the effective silencing of operational creditors and small suppliers; the ambiguous interface with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002; and the deeper constitutional question of democratic accountability that arises when a general insolvency code deliberately extinguishes legislative first charges. The paper argues that the doctrine is analytically sound in its Ghanashyam Mishra formulation and that Rainbow Papers should be referred to a larger Bench for reconsideration. It concludes with a legislative proposal modelled on Section 1129(a)(9) of the United States Bankruptcy Code as the most principled path to resolving the government-dues impasse without surrendering the Code's structural uniformity.