EMPEROR Vs. ASHIQ HUSAIN KHAN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an application in revision to set aside an order passed under Section 522 of the Criminal P. C. under the following circumstances: The applicant and two others were charged by one Altaf Husain of an offence under Section 447 of the Indian Penal Code, i.e., the offence of criminal trespass. The complainant alleged that he was in possession of certain fields and that when he went to them one morning he found the accused and their servants ploughing the fields and uprooting his sugarcane crop. He remonstrated and stood in front of the ploughs to stop the ploughing, whereupon the accused who were armed with sticks and lathis rushed at him with threats and chased him out of his fields. This prosecution story was accepted and the accused were convicted. The conviction was upheld in appeal. After the order in appeal had been passed the complainant applied to the Magistrate to be restored to possession and an order was passed accordingly under Section 522, Criminal Procedure Code. The District Magistrate refused to interfere in revision with this order and hence the present application.

(2.) The argument here, as it was in the courts below, is that no order could legally have been made under Section 522, inasmuch as it is not shown that the dispossession of the complainant, Altaf Husain, was effected by the use of criminal force. It is contended that even if criminal force was used, the dispossession was complete before any such force was resorted to. But it is denied that there was in fact any use of criminal force. The District Magistrate in his order in revision thought that criminal force was not used, but I do not agree. It was proved that the complainant who had halted in front of the ploughs was obliged to run away by reason of the accused's rushing at him with sticks and lathis and using threats towards him. That, I hold, was a resort to criminal force as defined in Secs.349 and 350 of the Indian Penal Code. It must be taken therefore that the offence of which the accused were convicted was one "attended by criminal force," to quote the language of Section 522.

(3.) As for the argument that the dispossession was not occasioned by criminal force, I am unable to entertain it. It is not, in my opinion, correct to say that the accused had. actually secured peaceable possession before the complainant arrived on the scene. The complainant came up while the acts of criminal trespass were still in progress and he had not already been effectively dispossessed. That only took place when the complainant was actually driven off his lands and, as has been shown, the act which drove him away was the use of criminal force by the accused.