Bringing down the curtain on litigation that has travelled through courts for more than three decades, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has held that civil courts have no jurisdiction to decide whether a property is evacuee.
The ruling came as Justice Jagmohan Bansal dismissed a second appeal filed before the high court in 1993. The original suit was filed before a Bhiwani court over land mortgaged before Partition.
The appellants now before the high court had initially moved the trial court seeking declaration to the effect that they were owners in possession of the evacuee property. Their stand in the matter was that the property was mortgaged by them to a person, who migrated to Pakistan in 1945.
Their counsel claimed it was open to the appellant to redeem the same at any point of time as it was a case of usufructuary mortgage. It is a type of mortgage where the borrower transfers the possession and use of a property to the lender while retaining ownership until the loan is repaid.
The other party-respondent claimed that the land was treated as evacuee property before being allotted to them. It was contended that a civil suit was not maintainable in accordance with Section 46 of Administration of Evacuee Property Act, 1950.
The appeal was filed before the High Court challenging concurrent findings of the trial court (1990) and the first appellate court (1992), both of which had dismissed the appellant-plaintiffs’ suit for declaring them owners.
After hearing rival contentions, the High Court held that Section 46 specifically debarred jurisdiction of civil courts in certain matters, including question whether a property was evacuee.
Justice Bansal ruled that the land was declared and treated as evacuee property under the Administration of Evacuee Property Act. Any civil suit questioning that character was barred by law, irrespective of the age of the dispute or the nature of the claim raised by private parties.
Referring to the provisions of the Act, Justice Bansal asserted: “It is evident that a civil court has no jurisdiction to decide whether a particular property is evacuee property or not. The State of Haryana and other respondents declared and treated property in question as evacuee property and further allotted to the other respondent. The appellants claimed said property as redeemed property. They were always of the opinion that it is not evacuee property. The question of nature of property was involved, which could not be adjudicated by a Civil Court”.
Dismissing the appeal, Justice Bansal asserted the court was of the considered opinion that there was substance in the argument of the other party that jurisdiction of a civil court in terms of Section 46 of the Act was barred.
The judgment is significant as it makes it clear Partition-era property disputes – however old the controversy – cannot be reopened once they fell within the domain of evacuee-property legislation and remedies cannot be sought through ordinary civil suits filed decades later.
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