Hammad Ahmed v. Abdul Majeed and Ors.
Background
This matter arose out of a dispute over control of Hamdard Laboratories (India), where the appellant (recognised by the Supreme Court in an earlier April 2019 judgment as the institution's Chief Mutawalli/head) sought directions restraining the respondents from interfering with Hamdard's management and permitting him to release payments on his own. The dispute centred on a line in that earlier judgment directing the parties to "continue with the arrangements" of a 2015 board resolution "in respect of the management" of Hamdard: a resolution that, in fact, had only ever concerned signing authority over two specific bank accounts, not overall management. The appellant also faced connected contempt petitions and a separate application about who should represent Hamdard in ongoing criminal proceedings against him.
Decision Breakdown
The Court held that its own earlier judgment contained an inadvertent drafting error: the word "management" in paragraph 59 should have read "banking operations," since the April 2015 resolution it referred to dealt only with joint signing authority on two bank accounts at a particular bank branch, not with overall control of Hamdard's affairs. It clarified that the High Court's Single Judge had never granted the appellant the exclusive right to operate Hamdard's bank accounts, and the Supreme Court's earlier order had not changed that. Having resolved the underlying confusion through this clarification, the Court dismissed the connected contempt petitions as no longer warranted, and separately held that a dispute over who should represent Hamdard in pending criminal cases against the appellant was outside the scope of the appeals already decided, leaving the applicant free to pursue that issue in the ongoing civil suit.
Lesson Learnt
Courts can and do issue clarificatory orders to correct an inadvertent wording error in a prior judgment where that wording is being read more broadly than intended, and disputes falling outside the scope of what a court actually decided must be pursued through the appropriate ongoing proceeding rather than by expanding an existing appeal.