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Ajay Kumar Vyas vs. Shree Sanatan Dharam Sabha (Regd.) & Ors.

Regular Second Appeal · 2026:DHC:7432Decided 2 Sept 2026New Delhi Bench
RSA 34/2026CNR: DLHC010051842026
Justice Neena Bansal Krishna

Background

The plaintiff claimed his late father, a founding figure honoured by a temple committee for building a shopping complex around a Delhi temple, had been a tenant of a shop, one portion of which the plaintiff's mother later ran as a small eatery ("Dhaba") through a licensee. The plaintiff, claiming the tenancy passed to him by his mother's will, sued to recover possession of that portion from the man (defendant no. 6) actually running the business there, alleging the temple committee's "Chairman" (whose very post the plaintiff disputed as illegitimate) had colluded to wrongly recognise that man as an independent tenant.

Decision Breakdown

Both lower courts found the plaintiff's side had produced no document, no licence receipts, no profit-sharing accounts, no records of any kind, to prove the alleged licensor-licensee arrangement with his mother, while the defendant produced municipal challans and receipts in his own name dating back to 1977, corroborating his account that the original tenant had surrendered the portion to him decades earlier. The High Court, finding these were purely factual findings with no substantial legal question raised, upheld the dismissal of the suit and the second appeal.

Lesson Learnt

Claims to inherited tenancy or a licensing arrangement must be backed by real contemporaneous documents: bald assertions about a family arrangement, however plausible-sounding, will not defeat a rival claimant who has decades of paper trail (bills, challans, receipts) showing actual, uninterrupted possession.

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