MUNDRIKA KUER Vs. PRESIDENT BIHAR STATE BOARD

JUDGEMENT

(1.) 1. This is an application under Articles 226 and 227 of the Constitution to quash the order of the President of the Bihar State Board of Religious Trusts, dated the 7th June, 1967, appointing a committee to administer a religious trust. The President of the Board has purported to exercise the powers conferred on him by the Bihar Hindu Religious Trusts Act, 1950 (hereinafter referred to as the Act). There was formerly some ambiguity as to whether the Act would apply both to public and private religious trusts; but in Mahant Ram Saroop Dasji v. S.P. Sahi , their Lordships have made it absolutely clear that the Act would apply only to public religious trusts and not to private religious trusts.

(2.) The trust was alleged to have been created by the petitioner herself by an arpannama dated the 15th July, 1940. According to the petitioner, however, the said document was executed by her on account of the fraudulent persuasion, of some of her enemies, and no such trust was created neither in law or in fact. It is, however, admitted that, after the coming into force of the Act, the petitioner submitted the statutory returns to the Board for two years, paid also the requisite fee, and never alleged that the arpantiama was a farzi document or else that the trust was illusory. Subsequently, however, disputes arose between her and the Board, and she was criminally prosecuted in 1962 in T.R. Case No. 353 of 1962 for an offence under Section 67 of the Act read with Section 60(1). She was, however, acquitted by a first -class Magistrate of Patna on the 18th September, 1963. The petitioner also instituted a suit (Title Suit No. 46 of 1963) in the Court of the 2nd Additional Subordinate Judge, Gaya, for a declaration that the disputed properties were her secular properties and not the properties of a religious trust. The Board was the principal contesting defendant in that litigation, and its main defence was that there was a genuine religious endowment created by the petitioner, and that the properties ceased to be secular properties. In that case, strangely enough, the petitioner did not put forward an alternative case to the effect that, even if the endowment be held to be a religious trust, that trust was a private trust and not a public religious trust, and that, consequently, the Board had no jurisdiction to take up the administration of the same. The entire litigation was fought out on the simple question as to whether the arpannama was a farzi document, and the properties remained all along secular properties, of the petitioner or else whether the arpannanama was a genuine document, by which a religious trust was created. The learned Additional Subordinate Judge, by his judgment dated the 29th May, 1965, dismissed the plaintiff's suit, and held that, by virtue of the said arpannama, a genuine religious trust was created. We understand from the learned Counsel for the petitioner that an appeal against that judgment is now pending in the High Court.

(3.) Being emboldened by the judgment of the learned Additional Subordinate Judge, the Board tried to take over the management of the trust by appointing a committee; but the petitioner's allegation is that she has not yet given up possession of the properties.