Rajesh Mitra @ Rajesh Kumar Mitra & Anr. vs Karnani Properties Ltd.
Background
This was an eviction dispute over a rented room on Park Street, Kolkata. The landlord sued for eviction, arguing that the tenant's mother (the original tenant) had died in 2009, and under West Bengal's 1997 tenancy law, a tenant's heirs can only continue occupying the premises for five years after the original tenant's death, so the appellants should have vacated by 2014. Both the Single Judge and the Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court sided with the landlord, ordering the appellants to vacate within 60 days, based on an "admission" the tenant had allegedly made in an unrelated case.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court found that the eviction should never have been decided on the basis of an alleged "admission" without a full trial. On the merits, it held that the actual original tenant, Sh. S.K. Mitra, had died back in 1970, long before the 1997 Act came into force, and his tenancy was jointly inherited by his wife and the appellants at that time, under the older 1956 Act which allowed heritable tenancy without the five-year cutoff. The Court ruled that a new law cannot take away vested rights retrospectively unless the legislature says so in clear and unambiguous terms, which the 1997 Act did not do. It therefore held that the appellants' tenancy had not expired and set aside both the Single Judge's and Division Bench's eviction orders.
Lesson Learnt
A law that changes tenants' inheritance rights generally applies only from the date it comes into force. It cannot be used to retroactively strip away rights that had already vested under an earlier law, unless the new law says so explicitly and clearly.