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Tek Singh v. Shashi Verma & Anr.

Civil Appeal · 2019 INSC 131Decided 4 Feb 2019
Civil Appeal No. 1416 of 2019
Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman · Justice Vineet Saran

Background

A shopkeeper (Respondent No. 1) sued claiming she had been illegally dispossessed from a shop she was running under a partnership with the landlady, while the appellant (the man actually occupying the shop) claimed he had been a tenant there since 2004 under an agreement with the same landlady. A trial court and a first appellate court both refused the shopkeeper's request for an interim injunction to restore her to possession, concluding on the facts that the appellant was the genuine long-standing tenant and that the shopkeeper and landlady appeared to have colluded against him. A Single Judge of the Himachal Pradesh High Court then overturned these concurrent findings in a revision petition and granted the injunction, apparently influenced by a police complaint rather than by the legal merits.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the High Court's judgment violated settled law at multiple levels: first, since 1999 amendments to Section 115 of the Civil Procedure Code, revision petitions cannot be used to challenge purely interlocutory orders that do not finally dispose of the suit; and second, even where revision is available, it is confined to correcting jurisdictional errors, not re-appreciating facts or law as if it were an appeal, per the Court's own precedent in D.L.F. Housing & Construction Co. v. Sarup Singh. The Court also noted that granting a mandatory interim injunction requires an even higher threshold (a "strong case," not just a prima facie one, per Dorab Cawasji Warden v. Coomi Sorab Warden), none of which the High Court had considered. It therefore set aside the High Court's judgment, restored the lower courts' orders, and directed the trial court to dispose of the underlying summary suit within six months.

Lesson Learnt

A High Court's revisional power is narrow: it can correct jurisdictional errors or illegal procedure, but it cannot be used as a backdoor appeal to re-examine factual findings that two lower courts have already agreed upon, especially for merely interlocutory orders.

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

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