SHANKAR LAL Vs. SUNDER LAL

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE petitioners are resident of district Agra (Utter Pradesh). They are aggrieved against a summoning order passed by the Judicial Magistrate Ist Class Rohtak, on a complaint requiring them to come and answer a charge under section 420 Indian Penal Code. Challenging the same, they have approached this Court in its inherent powers under section 482, Code of Criminal Procedure.

(2.) THE complainant is a resident of Rohtak. As averred by him in the complaint Annexure P -1, the complainant -Om Parkash had come across the petitioners at Agra and had become acquainted with them. Statedly on one of their visits to Rohtak, the petitioner asked the complainant to pay them Rs. 500/ - as they were in need of the said sum and, at the same time, assured him that they would return the same as soon as they reached their village. Led by the said assurance, the complainant, who had statedly no money with him borrowed the same from another man, and gave over the said sum to the petitioner. The money was not sent back. The complainant statedly then had been waiting for a few months, whereafter he wrote letters to the petitioner asking the to send money. The petitioners, in reply, admitted their liability to pay but expressed their inability to pay the sum immediately and assured that the same would be paid after Dussehra festival. Even after the said festival, the money was not returned. Then in November 1982, the complainant sent one of his acquaintances to the accused petitioner but they flatly refused to make the payment. Bemoaning that the intention of the accused -petitioner right from the beginning, was to deceive the complainant, he filed a complaint in the Criminal Court under section 420, Indian Penal Code.

(3.) ON the other hand, the accused -petitioner claimed that the complaint is a motivated one, to put pressure on them in a civil litigation regarding specific performance of an agreement to sell a property at Agra, which they were having with one Ashit Nath Banerjee. The said Shri Banerjee, in defiance to the agreement of sale, had sold the property afore -referred, to one Gurbachan Singh. The present complaint as also another one, which was filed at Agra, (that too for the cheating of Rs. 500/ -) was statedly got filed by Gurbachan Singh as a means to pressurise the petitioners. And furthermore, it was alleged that Fakhrudin and Habibu Din, who figure as witnesses in the complaints, were intimately connected with Gurbachan Singh, for the former was his partner in business.