L BISHAMBHAR NATH Vs. EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an application for the revision of an order of the City Magistrate of Shahjahanpur upholding the conviction of the applicant under Section 307 of the Municipalities Act, but reducing the fine from Rs. 100 to Rs. 50. An application for revision of this order has already been made to the learned Sessions Judge, who, however, in his order of August 9,1934, refused to interfere. The circumstances are given sufficiently fully in the judgment of the Courts below. It has been argued in support of the present application that the applicant can at this stage re-open the question of whether the notice issued by the Board was a valid notice, and it has also been suggested that as the Board acquiesced in the existence of the applicant's platform for a number of years and accepted some payments in respect of it, it must be deemed to have compounded this offence, if any, committed by the applicant.

(2.) This last point can be very shortly dealt with. The offence, as the City Magistrate has pointed out, was not the encroachment, but the failure to obey the notice. There never has been any question of compounding this offence.

(3.) The question of whether it is open to the applicant to challenge the validity of the notice at this stage has been decided by a Bench of this Court in the case of Har Prasad V/s. King-Emperor . In the present case, the applicant did challenge the validity of the notice by appealing to the Collector. The Collector in an order which is on the record decided that the notice was a valid one, although he appears to have thought that there were some equities in favour of the applicant.