SEETA RAM Vs. PIRTHI CHAND

JUDGEMENT

(1.) IN the petition for ejectment from the shop in dispute under Section 13 of the East Punjab Urban Rent Restriction Act, one of the grounds raised by the petitioner was of subletting. To prove that issue, he summoned Kewal Singh, Inspector, Sales Tax, to produce the partnership deed submitted by the respondents for getting their firm registered deed was available in the records of the department. The petitioner then put certain questions to the witness about the entries made in the prescribed from ST-2 for registration of the firm. The Rent Controller did not allow to do so being of the view that such a disclosure by the department would be barred by the provisions of Section 26 of the said Act. Aggrieved thereby, the petitioner has come up in this revision.

(2.) THE scope of the provisions of Section 26 came up for consideration in Ram Murti v. Hans Raj and others, 1968 Current Law Journal 945 and it was ruled by Pandit, J., that only documents which were relevant for the purposes of assessment, would be covered by the provisions of this Section and the Court would not be entitled to require any officer of the State Government to produce before it any of those documents. It was further observed that the Section does not lay down that everything that is filed before the Sales Tax Department, irrespective of its nature, would come within the purview of this Section. In that case the landlord wanted the department to produce the application filed by the tenant for cancellation of his licence and its production was held to be not barred by the provisions of the said Section. In the present case the landlord wants to prove the contents of the form submitted for registration of the firm which is a document of the same nature as was the one in Ram Murti's case (supra).