Allahabad High Court slams ‘abuse’ of PIL, fines man Rs 5 lakh for concealing civil suit in property dispute

Chief Justice Arun Bhansali and Justice Kshitij Shailendra dismissed the PIL.

What PIL sought?

• The petitioner had alleged that the respondents had illegally encroached on the pathway by constructing a wall along with a gate and were using the same only for their own purposes.
• It was stated that the respondents were land mafias and criminals who had encroached on the land belonging to the municipal corporation, Moradabad.
• The petitioner approached the high court seeking a direction to the authorities to remove the ‘illegal’ encroachment created by wall and gate constructed by respondents.
• During the hearing before the court, a compliance affidavit was filed by the city commissioner, Nagar Nigam, Moradabad, stating therein that the gate was removed.
• The court was informed that a civil suit was pending in a Moradabad court against the petitioner and others seeking to restrain them from causing any interference in the properties and physical possession of the respondents.

‘Gross mischief’

The bench noted that despite being a party to the suit and having participated in the proceedings for nearly a year, the petitioner stated in the PIL that no case concerning the land was pending before any court.

“…the averment made in paragraph-16 of the writ petition that ‘to the best knowledge of the deponent (i.e. the petitioner himself), no case is pending before any court law with regard to the land in dispute’, is not only patently false but also amounts to gross mischief on the part of the petitioner,” the court noted.

The court further observed that the pathway in question was not a thoroughfare but a dead-end road leading only to properties owned by the respondents.

Consequently, it held that the route was not meant for use by the general public and that installation of the gate could not be said to have caused inconvenience to the public at large.

The bench also took note of documents showing that the petitioner had acted as a witness to agreements relating to properties owned by the respondents and was a defendant in the pending civil litigation. These facts, according to the court, demonstrated that the petitioner had a direct personal interest in the dispute and had not approached the court with clean hands.

The court observed that the petitioner was not only restrained by an injunction order passed by the civil court but was also closely connected with the transactions relating to the property owned and possessed by the respondents.

It said the petitioner could not escape responsibility merely by claiming that he was only a witness to the agreements, nor could he conceal his misconduct in filing the present petition by advancing such arguments.

The court remarked that the PIL was filed to circumvent the civil proceedings and the injunction operating against the petitioner.

“This petition is a gross abuse and misuse of the process of law and has been filed to defeat the suit proceedings in which an injunction order is operating against the petitioner and the petitioner has also succeeded in getting the gate removed/dismantled/ uprooted from the spot only and only on account of prima facie entertainment of this petition when all facts were not before the Court,” the court observed.

Relying on a series of Supreme Court judgments cautioning against misuse of PIL jurisdiction, the bench stressed that courts must discourage petitions motivated by private interests or ulterior considerations.

The court dismissed the petition with costs of Rs 5 lakh. It directed the authorities to reinstall the gate forthwith and ordered that Rs 2 lakh from the recovered costs be paid to the respondents, Rs 1 lakh be used for reinstallation of the gate, and the remaining Rs 2 lakh be deposited with the District Legal Services Authority, Moradabad.