TULASI AMMAL Vs. DANALAKSHMI AMMAL

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an application to this Court to exercise its power under Section 476 of the Criminal P. C. to make a complaint in respect of the alleged fabrication of a certain document. In A.S. No. 18 of 1928 a settlement deed, Exhibit B, figured as having been executed by one Govindaswami Naidu. The document bore the alleged signature of Govindaswami in seven places and it appeared to have been attested by five persons and to have been written by a sixth person. The suit out of which the appeal arose was to enforce registration of this document and the plaintiff (now 1 respondent) was Govindaswami's second wife and a substantial beneficiary under the settlement deed, much to the prejudice of the first wife who was the 1 defendant in the suit. Proceedings had taken place before the District Registrar, who had refused to register this document on the ground that its genuineness was not established. The trial Court passed a decree directing that the settlement deed should be registered, relying upon a considerable amount of evidence given before the District Registrar and filed in the Civil Court instead of by fresh examination of the witnesses to prove execution by Govindaswami. When the case came before this Court it was discovered, as the judgment will be found to state, that each of the seven signatures could be ascribed to tracing from one or another of three signatures in another document, an adoption deed Ex. A. The conclusion was accordingly reached that the document must be a forgery and the appeal was allowed and the suit dismissed.

(2.) In this application we may deal first with the position of the writer and attestors. Section 476, Criminal Procedure Code, deals with offences referred to in Section 195, Sub-section (1), Clause (b) or Clause (c) " which appear to have been committed in or in relation to a proceeding in that Court," i.e., the Court whose sanction is sought. Turning then to Section 195(1) and dealing with Sub- clause (b), the offence so far as the attestors are concerned would fall under Section 193, Indian Penal Code, viz., either giving false evidence in a judicial proceeding or, it is suggested, fabricating false evidence for the purpose of being used in any stage of judicial proceeding. So far as the former offence is concerned the objection has been raised that the depositions in question were given not before the Civil Court at all but before the Registrar in the course of his enquiry, and that under Sub-section (2) of Section 195 the term "Court" as employed in that section does not include a Registrar under Indian Registration Act, 1877. Accordingly the qualification which Sub-clause (b) contains that such offence must be alleged to have been committed in or in relation to any proceeding in any Court has no application, with the result that the matter is not such as this Court would be justified in making a complaint of under Section 476, Criminal Procedure Code. Similarly with regard to fabricating false evidence, Section 193 of the Indian Penal Code itself requires that the false evidence should be fabricated for the purpose of being used in any stage of judicial proceeding, and the corresponding qualification in Sub-clause (b) requires that the fabrication must be with a view to the production of the document in Court: There is no reason to suppose that the primary purpose of the forgery of the document was production in Court or that it would necessarily be produced in Court at all.

(3.) There remains Sub-section (c) of Section 195, which deals with the act of forgery or using as genuine a forged document. Attached to this is the qualification that the offence, whichever it is, must be alleged to have been committed by a party to the proceeding before the Court and it has been held in a series of cases which one of us has summarised in Ponnuswami Udayar In re (1928) 28 L.W. 769 that the languages of Section 195 must be read in conjunction with the terms of Section 476, so that it is only in the case of offences committed by a party to the proceeding that the Court should take action under the latter section. The consequence, therefore, is that without expressing any view as to the merits of the application against these persons--the writer and the attestors of the document-- we must find that the intervention of the Court is unnecessary for their prosecution for the offences specified.