BALAVENKATARAMA CHETTIAR Vs. HINDU RELIGIOUS ENDOWMENTS BOARD

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This appeal is from the decree of the additional District Judge of Coimbatore in O.S. No. 2 of 1937 dismissing a suit instituted under Section 63, Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act, for setting aside a scheme settled by the Board, on the preliminary ground that the plaintiffs who were the trustees of the religious endowment in question namely Sri Kannika-parameswari Amman temple at Peria Nagaman in Pollachi taluk were estopped from questioning the scheme. This defence of estoppel was raised by the Board (defendant 1) though the right of recourse to a civil Court from the order of the Board settling a scheme was intended to be nagatived in this manner. It is difficult to understand how the Board which dealt with this matter of settling a scheme in a judicial capacity after hearing the parties and taking evidence can be said to have been prejudiced so as to attract the doctrine of estoppel. Assuming however that the Board is under no disability, so to say, of putting forward a plea of this kind in respect of a matter decided by it judicially or at least quasi-judicially the question remains whether the Court below was right in deciding this plea in favour of the Board. Reliance is mainly placed on a certain statement made by one of the plaintiffs Balavenkatarama Chettiar before the Inspector of religious endowments on 24 November 1935 in the village itself in the course of an inquiry which he was holding into the petition presented by certain persons against the trustees of the temple. At the end of a long statement recorded from this plaintiff by the Inspector, an addition is made to the following effect: I have no objection to a dittam being settled by the Board for the management of the aforesaid temple. Nor do I have any objection to the appointment of a responsible man from out caste as interim trustee or to any other order being passed until the dittam is framed.

(2.) The word dittam which is found in the above statement has been taken to be equivalent to the word scheme in the lower Court's judgment, but without any sufficient justification, it would appear, for the ordinary meaning of the word dittam is certainly not the same as that of the word scheme . A scheme for the management of a temple is one thing, whereas a dittam for the conduct of affairs in a temple is different. Unfortunately in this note the word dittam is applied to the management of the temple, but this does not mean that the word was used in the sense of a scheme. Dittam is a word which is found used in the Hindu Religious Endowments Act itself, vide Section 55, where dittam is described as the scale of expenditure in the temple, and that is the sense in which it is, so far as we are aware, used with reference to temples and indeed that must be the sense in which it must have been used by a man like the person who made this statement, namely a trustee of the temple. In other words, when a trustee of a temple speaks of dittam, he could only mean the scale of expenditure which is fixed for the conduct of necessary services etc., in the temple and certainly could not have meant a scheme for management of the temple affairs involving the appointment or election of trustees and so on. It is therefore clear to us that this statement cannot be regarded as being a consent given to the framing of a regular scheme for the administration of the temple or the religious endowment. The other evidence relied upon in support of this alleged consent is quite inconclusive. Certain notes made by two Commissioners during the inquiry have been pointed out to us as showing that the parties agreed to a scheme being settled. But if the words are to be construed strictly, as the plaintiffs were not present before the Commissioners in person, they could not have agreed, and if, as is now alleged, it was the vakil, who appeared for the plaintiffs, who gave the consent, the note should have been to this effect. If as a matter of fact, the vakil who appeared for the plaintiffs before the Board had consented to the framing of a scheme, it would have boon quite possible to prove this fact either by examining the vakil or at least the vakil who appeared on the opposite side, if it was thought that it would not be consonant with the dignity of the Commissioners for one. of them to give evidence in the case. The best evidence on this point has not been put before us and we are unable to regard the statements made in the notes as being sufficient to show in a matter of this importance that the plaintiffs had unreservedly given their consent to the framing of a scheme just as the Board pleased. The evidence of D.W. 1 on this point is really irrelevent being substantially nothing more than hearsay evidence. We are therefore not satisfied that in this case there was any real consent given to the Board's framing a scheme as it pleased.

(3.) Even otherwise, any consent given to the framing of a scheme would not cover a scheme which it would be beyond the jurisdiction of the Board to frame. The temple in question was decided by the Board itself to be an excepted temple, and in view of Section 84 of the Act that decision is final as no one objected to that decision. So far as the powers of the Board to frame schemes in, regard to excepted temples are concerned, they are to be found in Section 63 of the Act, and as it now stands, it provides, no doubt, for the fixing of the number of non- hereditary trustees, for the appointment of new trustees, in addition to the existing trustees or for associating persons with the trustees, but not for appointing new trustees in the place of existing trustees and in effect for the removal of the existing trustees and replacing them by others. Whether this has been done in this case or not does not seem to be established as clearly as it might have been, and we do not therefore propose to decide this point, because for other reasons we have decided that the case should go back to the Court below for disposal on the merits, and it will be left to the Court below to decide this point, namely whether any portion of the scheme settled by the Board is beyond the jurisdiction of the Board.