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Sri Biswanath Banik & Anr. vs Smt. Sulanga Bose & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2022 INSC 300Decided 14 Mar 2022
Civil Appeal No. 1848 of 2022
M.R. Shah · B.V. Nagarathna

Background

The plaintiffs (respondents in this appeal) had sued for a declaration of title and continued possession of a property under Section 53A of the Transfer of Property Act, based on a 1995 agreement, along with a permanent injunction against interference with their possession. The defendants (the appellants here) applied to have the plaint thrown out at the threshold under Order VII Rule 11 of the Civil Procedure Code, arguing the suit was filed too late and that such a declaration suit could not legally be brought against the property's actual owner. The trial court refused to reject the plaint, but the Calcutta High Court, in a revision petition, reversed this and threw out the plaint entirely on both grounds.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that a plaint can only be rejected as time-barred under Order VII Rule 11(d) if it is barred on the face of the plaint's own averments read as a whole - a court cannot pick out a single paragraph while ignoring others that show a later cause of action. Here, while one paragraph referred to events from 2004, other paragraphs of the plaint described a fresh cause of action arising in August 2010 (newspaper advertisements to sell the property to a third party, and an attempt to forcibly dispossess the plaintiffs), which the High Court had overlooked. The Court also held that even if the Section 53A declaration claim alone might be doubtful, the plaint also sought a permanent injunction based on continuous possession, and a plaint cannot be partly rejected - since the reliefs were interconnected, the suit as a whole could not be thrown out at this preliminary stage. The Supreme Court therefore set aside the High Court's order, restored the trial court's order, and allowed the suit to proceed to trial on its merits, without any observations from this stage binding the trial court's final decision.

Lesson Learnt

When deciding whether to dismiss a lawsuit at the very outset for being "time-barred" or "not maintainable," a court must read the entire complaint together rather than seizing on isolated sentences, and cannot strike out only part of a lawsuit whose different claims are legally intertwined.

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

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