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Balbir Singh & Anr. v. Baldev Singh (D) Through His LRs & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2025 INSC 81Decided 17 Jan 2025
Civil Appeal Nos. 563-566 of 2025 (arising from SLP(C) Nos. 22802-22805 of 2022)
Justice J.B. Pardiwala · Justice R. Mahadevan

Background

Four connected 1994 suits for specific performance of agreements to sell were decreed by the trial court, reversed on first appeal, and then restored by the High Court in second appeal only in 2018, over two decades after the original decrees. The decree-holders (plaintiffs) filed execution petitions and sought court permission to deposit the balance sale consideration, which the judgment-debtors (defendants) resisted by applying under Section 28 of the Specific Relief Act to have the contracts rescinded for non-payment within the originally stipulated 20-day window.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court upheld the High Court's view that Section 28 rescission requires the court that passed the decree to have fixed a specific time for deposit, and the decree-holder to have wilfully defaulted on it, neither of which applied here, since the High Court's 2018 order restoring the trial court's decree did not itself prescribe a fresh deposit deadline. The decree-holders had promptly sought and been given permission to deposit shortly after filing execution, and there was no unreasonable delay attributable to them. The Court also distinguished an earlier precedent relied on by the judgment-debtors, holding it applied to a materially different factual scenario, and found no error of law in the High Court's dismissal of the rescission applications.

Lesson Learnt

A judgment-debtor cannot force rescission of a specific-performance decree under Section 28 merely by pointing to an old, since-superseded timeline; rescission requires a live, court-fixed deposit deadline and genuine wilful default by the decree-holder. Courts will not let defendants use stale procedural deadlines to defeat decrees that have already been through years of appeal.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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