S. Sangeetha and Others v. Tmt. P. Ponni
Background
In a pending probate suit over the will of one late C. Shyamalavalli, the defendant (Sangeetha and others) objected to a lengthy "proof affidavit" and several documents filed by the plaintiff (Ponni), asking the court to strike them out as irrelevant or inadmissible. Both the trial judge and the Madras High Court refused to strike out most of the material, holding that objections to documents should generally be examined at the final judgment stage, not thrown out at the threshold. The defendants appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, agreeing with the courts below. It held that only documents lacking any explanation for missing originals (photocopies with no justification) were rightly excluded, while the remaining materials, even if their relevance was disputed, could not be thrown out at a preliminary stage since they related to genuinely contested facts about the family's properties. The Court reaffirmed the long-standing principle that merely marking a document as an exhibit does not prove its contents; that still has to be established through proper evidence at trial, and objections to documents are best decided at the final judgment stage rather than being pre-emptively excluded.
Lesson Learnt
Courts are reluctant to strike out evidence at a preliminary stage of a trial merely because a party calls it irrelevant; genuine disputes about relevance and admissibility are usually decided only after the full trial, and simply filing or marking a document as an exhibit is not the same as proving what it says.