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Yashoda (Alias Sodhan) vs Sukhwinder Singh and Others

Civil Appeal · 2022 INSC 946Decided 12 Sept 2022
Civil Appeal No. 8247 of 2009
B.R. Gavai · C.T. Ravikumar

Background

The original plaintiff (grandfather of the respondents) first filed a suit for declaration in 1994 based on an alleged family settlement, then withdrew it, and within a month filed a fresh suit for specific performance of an agreement to sell allegedly executed in January 1993, without disclosing the earlier suit at all, and even affirmatively stating in the plaint that "no litigation" was pending regarding the agreement. The defendant (the appellant, an elderly, illiterate woman who claimed she was tricked into putting her thumb impression on a blank paper by her cousin, the plaintiff) resisted on grounds including fraud and non-disclosure of the earlier suit. The trial court dismissed the suit for this suppression, but the Appellate Court reversed and decreed specific performance, and the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed the defendant's second appeal without even correctly recording which side had won below.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the plaintiff's failure to disclose the earlier suit for declaration (and the explanation for it (that it was filed merely to save stamp duty), raised for the first time only in a Replication after the defendant objected) was an act of trickery amounting to fraud on the court, not an innocent omission. Relying on precedents including S.P. Chengalvaraya Naidu and A.V. Papayya Sastry, the Court reiterated that a person who comes to court must come with clean hands, and a judgment obtained by suppressing a material fact is a nullity. The Court found the Appellate Court had wrongly excused this suppression and that the High Court's judgment showed total non-application of mind (it even got the procedural history backwards), and therefore restored the trial court's dismissal of the suit.

Lesson Learnt

In a suit seeking a discretionary remedy like specific performance, a litigant must disclose prior related litigation in the plaint itself, concealing it, and only explaining it away after being caught, can be treated as fraud on the court that forfeits the relief altogether, regardless of the underlying merits of the claim.

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

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