BALLARD ESTATE Vs. CHAMPALAL VITHURAM JAJOO

JUDGEMENT

(1.) If law cannot give you what you seek, litigation will. The appellant, it seems, strongly believes in it and proves it right, too.

(2.) The appellant is a well-known--or is it notorious?--entity: Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL). It becomes a lessee in 1965; secures no registered lease deed; rather it fails "by inadvertence" to have the lease deed registered; continues as a lessee for twenty years, the originally agreed period; seeks extension but fails to get; then litigates for extension and loses; appeals and loses; and still appeals. All the while it holds on to the property. Now it has been a tenant for 55 years. It is on the strength of an unregistered lease deed. In other words, it is supposed to be a tenant for 30 days; that is all it gets as a lessee under an unregistered lease. But BPCL continues as a lessee for 55 years. Law gives it 30 days, and litigation stretches it to 20,075 days.

(3.) It pays to litigate, so BPCL litigates. Blissfully, it is a profitmaking PSU; it can afford to litigate and engage its lessors across the country in a war of attrition. It tries to convert every case into Dickensian Jarndyce v. Jarndyce1. Before decades, it has inherited many leases with the same terms;