HARJINDER SINGH Vs. RANJIT KAUR AND OTHERS

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The revision petition is against a rejection of a plea to tender secondary evidence of a Will dated 04.02.1999 said to be in the custody of the 5th defendant-Harbhajan Singh. The plaintiff had filed copy of the Will for acceptance and pleaded that his inability to secure the original was on account of the refusal of the 5th defendant to produce the document in spite of an application moved in that regard.

(2.) The court went into an elaborate discussion of how the contention that the original was lost could not be true and referred to a so-called artificiality of the contentions that the original Will was in the hands of the 5th defendant. In the manner of rejecting the application, the court was literally giving an elaborate discourse of how the Will could not be true.

(3.) The Judge has done a gross injustice by pronouncing about what he thought was unnatural and how the copy of the Will could not be directed to be produced even before allowing for a party to give evidence of the circumstances under which the Will was said to have been written. It is absolutely essential that a Presiding Officer keeps himself abreast of law, for, it is his grasp of law of fundamental rules of procedure that can allow for a smooth progress of trial. The courts provide Judges with enough legal resources to equip themselves and even software applications are made available for a Judge to keep track of the latest developments in law. We still see in several judgments, subordinate courts referring to the judgments of various parts of India without knowing views of its own High Court to which it is subordinate. There is nothing inherently wrong in keeping the mind open to allow for knowledge to come from all directions but if it is closing its own window of knowledge by not knowing what its High Court itself was stating on issues of trial, it will only give rise to half baked judgments, the way it has happened in this case. It is a complete travesty of justice that the Judge would be deciding on whether secondary evidence could be admitted or not by elaborate consideration, the way it was done before the commencement of the trial and allowing for cross-examination of witnesses on what was stated in the affidavit.