MUHAMMED BASHEER Vs. A MUJIB RAHMAN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The spearhead of the contentions of the revision petitioner is that the Appellate Authority has grossly misunderstood the words of the apex court that the judge of facts when assessing and ascertaining the bona fides of the need set up should place himself in the armchair of the landlord and ask the question to himself whether in the given facts substantiated by the landlord, the need to occupy the premises can be said to be natural, real, sincere, honest. His grievance is that the court has a trifle identified itself with the landlord instead of dispassionately examining the genuineness of the proposed need and resorted to a contrived justification to hand out an order to ease him out of the commercial space.

(2.) At the outset, we would like to clarify that, really, when the Supreme Court in Shiv Sarup Gupta v. Dr. Mahesh Chandra Gupta counselled as above, what is meant is that the Judge should visualise himself in the place of the landlord amidst the real life factual background in which he is situated and then honestly endeavour to gauge the truth of the matter. What is contemplated or envisaged is a totally transparent, detached and objective assessment, absolutely disassociated, in order to rule out the possibility of any private motive, hidden agenda or pretense for eviction on the part of the landlord. The armchair analogy has no element of affinity with the landlord or prejudice against the tenant, and the same is intended to be a totally objective test to probe the state of mind of the landlord.

(3.) The revision petition is directed against the verdict of the Appellate Authority in arriving at a divergent finding resulting in an order of ejectment of the revision petitioner/tenant from the petition schedule shop room. (The parties are hereinafter mentioned as per their status in the RCP). The respondent has harshly censured the reasoning of the Appellate Authority alleging that the same is the result of a misconceived or rather distorted perception as to the position of law in the matter and hence liable to be set aside.