AUTHORISED OFFICER THANJAVUR Vs. S NAGAMATHA AYYAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The short point of law decided in the long judgment under appeal may justly be given short shrift. But the batch of Civil Revision Petitions allowed by the High Court involves a legal issue of deep import from the angle of agrarian reform and surplus land available for distribution under its scheme that we deem it proper to discuss the core question at some length. If the statutory construction which found favour with the High Court be correct the risk of reform legislation being condemned to functional futility is great, and so the State has come up in appeal by Special Leave challenging the High Court's interpretation of Section 22 of the Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1961 (for short, the Ceiling Act). Presently, we will set out the skeletal facts relating to the civil appeals and the scheme of the Act designed for distributive justice in the field of agricultural land ownership, sufficient to disclose the purpose of the legislation, the mischief it intends to suppress, the reverse effect of the construction put on the key section (S. 22) in the Judgment under appeal and the consequent stultification of the objective of the Ceiling Act. While dealing with welfare legislation of so fundamental a character as agrarian reform, the Court must constantly remember that the statutory pilgrimage to 'destination social justice' should be helped, and not hampered, by judicial interpretation. For, the story of agrarian redistribution in Tamil Nadu, as elsewhere, has been tardy and zigzag, what with legislative delays, judicial stays and invalidations, followed by fresh constitutional amendments and new constitutional challenges and statutory constructions, holding up, for decades, urgent measures of rural economic justice which was part of the pledges of the freedom struggle. It is true that judges are constitutional invigilators and statutory interpreters; but they are also responsive and responsible to Part IV of the Constitution being one of the trinity of the mation's appointed instrumentalities in the transformation of the socio-economic order. The Judiciary in its sphere, shares the revolutionary purpose of the Constitutional order, and when called upon to decode social legislation must be animated by a goal oriented approach. This is part of the dynamics of statutory interpretation in the developing countries so that Courts are not converted into rescue shelters for those who seek to defeat agrarian justice by cute transactions of many manifestations now so familiar in the country and illustrated by the several cases under appeal. This caveat has become necessary because the judiciary is not a nere umpire, as some assume but an activist catalyst in the constitutional scheme.

(2.) The Ceiling Act, in its structure and process, follows the common pattern The object is equitable distribution of land to the landless by relieving those who hold more than the optimum extent fixed by the law. The success of the scheme depends on maximisation of surplus land to be taken over by the State from large landholders. The strategy of fixing a severe ceiling on land holdings was expected to be paralysed by anticipatory stratagems by landholders and so the legislature sought to outwit them and clamped down pre-emptive restrictions on transfers whereby the surplus take over would be sabotaged. Chapter II prescribes the ceiling on land holdings and Chapter III prescribes certain types of deleterious transfers and future acquisitions. One such provision is Section 22 which falls for immediate dissection. The machinery for working out the scheme includes 'authorised officers' as defined in Section 3 (5) of the Ceiling Act. The rest of the infra-structure for implementation of the statutory scheme is not material for our case nor the other chapters relating to compensation, exemptions and the like. Chapter XI provides for appeals and revisions and the High Court, by virtue of Section 83 read with Section 115 of the Code of Civil Procedure, has jurisdiction to entertain revisions against orders of Land Tribunals which enjoy appellate powers over orders of authorised officers in the manner provided. The present appeals are against a common order of the High Court allowing several revision petitions under Section 115, C. P. C.

(3.) Now, the respondents before us in the several appeals are persons whose transfers have been held void by the authorised officer and the land Tribunal but upheld by the High Court on a narrow construction of Section 22 of the ceiling Act. The alienations took many forms ranging from stridhana to bona fide sale but shared one common attribute that they were executed during the suspect spell, if one may say so, between the date of commencement of the Act and the notified date. The legislature, in its realistic anxiety and pragmatic wisdom, demarcated a lethal zone viz. the period between the two dates stated above when all landholders with lands in excess of the ceiling would desperately salvage their surplus by resort to devices, some bona fide, some not but all having the effect of frustrating the legislative objective of freezing holdings as on the date of commencement of the Act and seizing the surplus in terms of the Act for eventual equitable distribution, after payment of statutory compensation.