SHEO BARAN SINGH Vs. LACHMI NARAIN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an application for revision of an order of the Subordinate Judge of Aligarh, rejecting the application made by the present applicant to the effect that he should decide a particular issue in a civil suit in his Court before proceeding to hear evidence on the rest of the issues. The suit was brought by Lachmi Narain against the applicant, who is a Munsif, for damages to the amount of Rs. 1,000 on account of physical injury and mental distress and disgrace by reason of the fact that on 10 February 1931 the Munsif had ordered him to be turned out of Court and had actually had him. turned out by a peon. The suit was brought against the Munsif and the peon and the defence was briefly that the plaintiff had not been actually turned out, although the Munsif did pass the order for turning him out, and that the Munsif was protected by the Judicial Officer's Protection Act (Act. 18 of 1850).

(2.) Mr. Dar in supporting the application for revision has referred to the plaint, a copy of which I have had the advantage of seeing, and I have no hesitation in describing it as extraordinarily argumentative and discoursive. The cause of action is not stated (sic) para. 27 of the original plaint, which has subsequently been altered so as to be para. 21. The circumstances in which the Munsif is alleged to have ordered the plaintiff to be turned out were simply that the Munsif had shown an order on the order sheet to the plaintiff and directed him to sign it, and the plaintiff refused to sign it without the Munsif signing it first. The paragraphs in the plaint previous to this relate to various orders passed by the Munsif in other matters in regard to the plaintiff and other parties on previous occasions, and they further by way of an introduction gave a rambling history of some of the plaintiff's other litigation and his relation with other persons. It is represented that if the Court allowed evidence to be given on such matters without in the first place deciding whether an action lies at all not only will there be great waste of public time and money by the litigants, but also the result will be most unfair to the Munsif who will be called upon in Court to justify various orders of his which are quite irrelevant to the present proceeding, and will possibly be degraded and made to look ridiculous before the Court and the public, all of which will be most improper if it is subsequently decided that he ought to have been protected by the provisions of the Act. For this reason an application was made to the trying Court to decide the issue relating to the question of whether the Munsif was protected by the Act before proceeding to hear evidence on the allegations made in the plaint.

(3.) The objection to the present application is that the matter before me is not a case decided and that no application for revision will lie under Section 115, Civil P.C. Counsels on both sides have argued this point at some length, but although I am decidedly of opinion that there is no case decided, I do not regard this as a matter of great importance, for I consider that this is a case in which, if necessary, the Court could interfere under Section 151, Civil P.C., on the ground that there was a danger of the process of the Court being abused. Whether the learned Subordinate Judge intended to allow the plaintiff to produce evidence in support of the incongruous and irrelevant matters set forth at great length in the so-called plaint, it is of course impossible at present to decide for certain. It does appear however that he at first made some attempt to amend the plaint by striking out some of the irrelevant matters, but he did not proceed very far with the task, and I am apprehensive that since he has left a large number of totally irrelevant paragraphs to stand and has called on the defendant to answer these paragraphs, it is possible that evidence will have to be led in support of the allegations made with the result that I have suggested above.