SUBANAMMA NINAN Vs. GEORGE VEERAN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The review petitioners are the appellants in R.F.A.No.810/2010. We heard the counsel appearing on both sides.

(2.) In the appeal, the decree for money in favour of the respondent was confirmed rejecting the plea of appellants that the suit was barred by limitation. It was also held that the relevant article in the Limitation Act , 1963, (for short, 'the Act, 1963') that applied to the suit was not Article 19 as contended by the appellants but the Article 35 of the said Act. We laid down the law that the appropriate Article that applies to a suit instituted on a dishonoured cheque is Article 35 and in that process, we followed an unreported decision in Puthenveettil Malathy & ors. v. Kuttilakandy Balakrishnan (A.S.No.436/02) cited by the learned counsel for the respondent. One of the grounds taken in support of review is that the judgment in Malathy's case had been already recalled by one of us (Justice A.Hariprasad) before the judgment under review was passed and therefore it is an error apparent on the face of the record. The submission made is not disputed by the learned counsel for the respondent. As rightly pointed out to us, when the judgment in Malathy's case was as a matter of fact not in force and could not have been followed, reliance on the recalled judgment, no doubt, is an error apparent on the face of the record which is liable to be corrected in a review proceeding.

(3.) However, after hearing the counsel on either side, we do not find that the error occurred is capable of upsetting our conclusion on the relevance and applicability of Article 35 of the Act, 1963, which we arrived at after detailed discussion and analysis of the relevant provisions of the Act, 1963 and the Negotiable Instruments Act , 1881 (for short, 'the NI Act '). We also notice that judgment in Malathy's case was recalled solely on factual grounds.