KHUSHAL Vs. LABHAN RAO

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE failure to notice the obviously preposterous nature of many if not most of the claims made in the civil Courts is perhaps the cause and perhaps the effect of the success of many of them, or perhaps both. In 1923 the father of the two plaintiffs sold their two-thirds share in joint family property, along with his own one-third share, to the defendant Khushal Teli for Rs. 40,000. It was not pretended in the plaint that there was anything wrong with the transaction beyond certain technical flaws in the conveyance, and the plaintiffs' claim, which has partly succeeded, was that, because of those flaws only, the whole of the property, including the share belonging to their father whom they joined as defendant 2, should be returned to them and they should be allowed to keep the Rs. 40,000 Khushal paid them for it. If it were not of almost daily occurrence that similar and even more preposterous claims are allowed to succeed, as this has been in part, it would be amazing that a Court should even consider this claim seriously.

(2.) IT has been found in the lower Court that plaintiff 1, Babhan Rao Maratha, was born on 18th January 1907 and, therefore, his 18th birthday was on 18th January 1925. The truth of this is doubtful, but the finding is no longer contested. Plaintiff 2 is Babhan Rao's younger brother Lal Saheb, who was born in the year 1920. On 27th February 1918, before Lal Saheb was born, Gulab Rao, for himself and for Labhan Rao, then just 11 years old, executed a mortgage of their ancestral village of Sangli in favour of one Sudarshan Prasad, as security for the repayment of a sum of Rs. 12,999 with which it was proposed to purchase the village of Kamhli. The village wag purchased with that money and is still in the possession of the joint family.

(3.) THREE days later the same persons, that is, Gulab Rao for himself and his younger son and Labhan Rao for himself, executed in consideration of Rs. 15,000 a deed of surrender of their occupancy rights in the whole of what had been their sir land in Sangli till three days before. This sum of Rs. 15,000 they owed to Khushal as the consideration for a sale-deed of the village of Dandesara executed by him on 20th July along with their sale-deed of Sangli. The real nature of this transaction is, of course, that, without the sanction of a revenue officer, the village of Sangli was sold without reservation of the right to occupy the sir land for Rs. 40,000, on which Rs. 36,000 went in paying off Sudarshan Prasad's mortgage and buying the village of Dandesara. It has not been stated that there was any sir laud in Dandesara, presumably there was none, or else cultivating rights in it were reserved.