YENIKOKALVA GORLA NARAPPA Vs. YENIKOKALVA CHINNAREPPA AND ORS.

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE petitioner was the plaintiff in O.S. No. 60 of 1944 in the Court of the District Munsiff of Anantapur, which was a suit for a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from interfering with the plaintiff's right to take water to his land. While the suit was pending, the petitioner applied for an interim injunction against the defendants, and this was granted on an undertaking given by the plaintiff that during the pendency of the suit he would not dig a channel in the defendant's land. From the lower appellate Court's judgment the actual terms of the undertaking were:

(2.) TWO arguments are put forward on behalf of the petitioner : (1) that as there was no injunction against the petitioner, there was no disobedience, and (2) that there was not in fact a violation of the undertaking. The first argument is not so much that there can be no disobedience but that there could be no disobedience to an injunction so as to render the petitioner punishable under Order 39, Rule 2, Sub -rule (3) of the Civil Procedure Code. I do not accept this contention and I agree respectfully with the decision of Varadachariar, J., in A. B. Gurumurthi Chetti v. : AIR1936Mad651 , to which my attention has been drawn. That was a case of an undertaking given by a defendant, but the reasoning appears to me to apply. equally to a plaintiff. It would certainly be surprising, in a case where a temporary injunction has been granted against a defendant subject to an undertaking by the plaintiff, if the defendant could be punished under Order 39, Rule 2, Sub -rule (3) for a breach of the injunction whereas the plaintiff could not be punished under that provision of the Civil Procedure Code for a breach of the undertaking. In the circumstances of this case, it does not seem to me to matter whether the undertaking given by the plaintiff is regarded as an injunction issued by the Court restraining him from digging a channel, or whether his undertaking should be regarded as a part of the interim injunction issued against the defendant. In either view there would be an injunction, a breach of which would be punishable under Order 39, Rule 2, Sub -rule (3).

(3.) THE petition must, therefore, be dismissed with the costs of the contesting respondents.