LEKSHMI AMMAL Vs. VELAYUDHAN KITTA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The only question that arises for consideration in these revision petitions is, how far the court below was right in finding possession with the appellants in the two C. M. Appeals before it and so proceeding to cancel the temporary injection orders which the Trial Court had passed in favour of the plaintiffs as against them.

(2.) The courts below had been uniform in finding that the sambalachits executed by the respective 1st defendant in favour of the common 2nd plaintiff did not come within the scope of Act 1 of 1957 so as to confer on the executants a right of permanent occupancy, but on the other hand they occupied the position of salaried employees only, for the purpose of carrying on the cultivation. The point on which the courts below differed was in respect of the nature of the control, which those defendants had over the property concerned, at date of the suits after termination of the jural relationship constituted by the sambalachits. For, while the Munsiff was of the opinion that there was and could be no possession in the eye of the law so far as the defendants were concerned, the learned District Judge found it possible to say that the defendants were in legal possession of the property and indeed that such position had been conceded by the plaintiffs themselves in their plaints. Learned Advocate General appearing for the revision petitioners refutes this assumption of the learned District Judge and presses for the acceptance of the Munsiffs findings in the matter.

(3.) Now the passages in the plaint on which the learned Judge founded himself, related to the averments in the one case that the 1st defendant did not shift from the farm house as he had undertaken but had begun to carry on agricultural operations by himself against the wishes of the plaintiffs and in the other case, that in spite of the termination of employment, the 1st defendant was continuing the cultivation operations with the aid of the plaintiffs cattle, implements and paddy. These averments no doubt admitted a continuing control of the defendants notwithstanding the termination of their agencies, but did not imply that the plaintiffs acquiesced in such continuance even to the slightest extent or that the defendants were engaged in any operation by way of cultivation on their own behalf. Indeed it would appear from the defendants replies themselves that they did not claim to have carried out any such operations.