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Selvi v. Gopalakrishnan Nair (D) Thr. Lrs. & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2018 INSC 513Decided 15 May 2018
Civil Appeal No. 21834 of 2017
Justice R. Banumathi · Justice L. Nageswara Rao

Background

This decades-old mortgage redemption dispute traced back to a 1913 usufructuary mortgage over land that changed hands through several assignments and sub-mortgages before landing in litigation originally filed in 1969. The trial court and the First Appellate Court had both accepted the plaintiffs' final decree application, but the Madras High Court (Madurai Bench) set it aside, holding that the appellant/plaintiff could not claim rights over one specific survey number that the second defendant claimed to be entitled to. During the Supreme Court appeal, one of the original co-plaintiffs also belatedly filed an affidavit alleging forgery and denying he had ever assigned his rights to the appellant, after decades of silence on the point.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court found the belated forgery allegation to be an afterthought carrying no weight, given that the objecting co-plaintiff had never raised it in over sixteen years before the trial court or the First Appellate Court and only raised it once the second appeal reached the High Court. The Court set aside the High Court's judgment and allowed the appeal, holding that the correct course was to send the matter back to the trial court to properly determine, with fresh evidence if needed, the precise survey numbers and boundaries of the disputed properties and whether they matched the properties originally mortgaged, and to determine the second defendant's claimed entitlement to the specific survey number in dispute. Given that the litigation had already run for over five decades, the Court specifically directed the trial court to expedite the remitted proceedings.

Lesson Learnt

A litigant cannot wait until a case has been fought for decades before raising a drastic allegation like forgery against a co-party for the first time at the appellate stage: courts will treat such belated claims with suspicion, especially where the person's conduct for years was inconsistent with the claim now being made.

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

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