Allahabad High Court Imposes Rs 50K Cost On Party For Filing False Affidavits Before Revenue Authority To Grab Widow's Property

The Court relied on Kishore Samrite v. State of U.P. and others, where the Supreme Court held that litigants who approach the Courts with the intention of deceiving or misleading the Court and come with unclean hands are frowned upon. The Apex Court held that such litigants are not entitled to be heard on merits not to any relief. The Apex Court held that,

“(iv) Quests for personal gains have become so intense that those involved in litigation do not hesitate to take shelter of falsehood and misrepresent and suppress facts in the court proceedings. Materialism, opportunism and malicious intent have over-shadowed the old ethos of litigative values for small gains.

(v) A litigant who attempts to pollute the stream of justice or who touches the pure fountain of justice with tainted hands is not entitled to any relief, interim or final.

(vi) The Court must ensure that its process is not abused and in order to prevent abuse of the process the court, it would be justified even in insisting on furnishing of security and in cases of serious abuse, the Court would be duty bound to impose heavy costs.”

Factual Background

Petitioner claimed to be nephew of one Ram Gopal. Another nephew's (late Ayodhya Prasad) wife and son are the other petitioners who claimed to be related to Ram Gopal. It is claimed that once the petitioners came to know of an unregistered Will of Ram Gopal, devolving the land upon them, they moved an application before the Tehsildar for mutation of their names in revenue records.

Tehsildar rejected the application. Revision against the same was also dismissed. Suit filed by petitioners under Section 229 (B) of the Uttar Pradesh Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, 1950 was also dismissed. Thereafter, first appeal and subsequent second appeal was also dismissed.

Counsel for petitioners submitted that even though the petitioners never supplied a copy of the unregistered Will to the Tehsildar, however, findings on the same were returned which were blindly followed by all other authorities. It was further submitted that even though the unregistered Will was produced before the First Appellate Authority, the Will was never proved while recording findings on the same.

Per contra, counsel for respondent argued that petitioners had tried to defraud the authorities by taking different stands before different authorities. It was argued that the Tehsildar has not accepted the unregistered Will and also returned reasons for the same. Thereafter, petitioners produced another unregistered Will after allegedly removing defects and took a stand for the first time before the First Appellate Authoritythat they had not produced the Will before the Tehsildar.

High Court Verdict

Perusing the record, the Court observed that the petitioners had not taken the plea regarding not filing the unregistered Will till the stage of filing first appeal. It was only before the First Appellate Authority that the petitioner, for the first time, took the plea that only four documents had been filed by them before the Tehsildar and unregistered Will was never filed before him.

The Court observed that only when the petitioners thought that they would not succeed in First Appeal, they took a stand that no unregistered Will was placed before the Tehsildar. The Court observed that the petitioner never disputed the revisional authority's finding regrading Tehsildar rejecting the unregistered Will based on defects.

Justice Kumar held that to grab the property from Ram Gopal's widow, petitioners had filed false affidavits and tried to mislead courts at all levels of trial. The Court held that not taking the ground that unregistered Will was not filed before the Tehsildar at the stage of revision, and only taking the same by rectifying the unregistered Will and producing it in First Appeal shows the fraudulent intent of the petitioners.

“This shows that the second unregistered Will of the same date by rectifying all the short comings as pointed out by the Tehsildar is nothing but amounts to cheating, playing fraud, misleading the Courts and also amounts to abuse of process of the Court. The unregistered Will which was produced by the petitioners before the Tehsildar was not found to be acceptable by the Tehsildar then there is no question to prove the second unregistered Will prepared by the petitioner afterthought.”

Holding that the petitioners had misused the process of law, the Court imposed a cost of Rs. 50,000 on the petitioners.

Case Title: Santosh Kumar And 2 Others v. Board OfRevenue U.P. Prayagraj Thru. Its Member Judicial And 10 Others [WRIT - B No. - 523 of 2024]