Judgment

DUA, J.:- This is an appeal by special leave. The three appellants and one Ramchander Kanu were tried in the court of the 2nd Assistant Sessions Judge, Chapra for offences under Sections 307 and 307/109, I. P. C. Akalu Ahir and Chandrika Singh were charged under Section 307, I. P. C. for firing pistol shots and gun shots at Ramdeo Ram at 11.00 p. m. on June 13, 1966, whereas Jagarnath and Ramchander Kanu were charged under Sections 307/109, I. P. C., for having abetted the commission of the aforesaid offence.

2. The occurrence is stated to be an off-shoot of election rivalry arising out of the election for the office of Mukhia of village Arakpur. Indeed the enmity between the two rival groups was of long standing and is not denied. But enmity as usual is a double-edged weapon, providing motive both for the offence as well as for false implication. The evidence in such a case has, therefore, to be scrutinised with care so that neither the guilty party wrongly escapes on the plea of enmity, nor an innocent person gets wrongly convicted on that basis.

3. In this case there were three eye witnesses. Ramdeo Ram, the victim of the fire shots, appeared as P. W. 1, Fuljharia as P. W. 9 and ploughman Bhuidhar Chamar as P. W. 10.. The trial Judge after considering the evidence on the record felt no doubt about the fact that Ramdeo Ram had been injured by gun shots, but he did not feel impressed by the prosecution evidence with respect to the manner in which the occurrence had taken place, with the result that in his opinion, the prosecution had not been able to prove the charges against the accused persons beyond reasonable doubt.

4. The State did not file any appeal against the order of acquittal. Ramdeo Ram, the victim of the gun shots, however, presented in the High Court in January, 1969 a revision petition under Sections 435 and 439, Cr. P. C. from the order acquitting the four accused persons. From a note on the printed application for revision, it appears that the name of Jagarnath Kanu was expunged from the array of respondents in the revision: vice, Court s order dated July 3, 1969. The High Court at the outset noticed that the scope of interference in revision at the instance of private parties in cases of acquittal is very limited. In this connection, it referred to the following four decisions of this Court:-

(i) D. Stephens v. Nosibolla, 1951 SCR 284;

(ii) Logendranath Jha v. Polailal, 1951 SCR 676;

(iii) K. C. Reddy v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (1963) 3 SCR 412 and

(iv) Mahendra Pratap Singh v. Sarju Singh, (1968) 2 SCR 287. After quoting from K. C. Reddy (supra), the categories of cases attracting interference by a High Court on a private party s revision and the observation that the said list was not exhaustive of all the circumstances in which a High Court may interfere and that other defect in the judgment under revision must be analogous to those actually indicated, the High Court proceeded to consider the case, professedly keeping those limits in view. It then criticised the appraisal of the evidence by the trial Court and found fault with several observations made by that Court in such appraisal. The reasons recorded by the trial Court for rejecting the evidence of P. W. I, Ramdeo Ram and of his wife Fuljharia, P. W. 9, were considered by the High Court to be "much too infirm". The High Court also felt that the evidence of Ramdeo Ram had been misread by the trial Court when it observed that his statement to the police was not in conformity with his evidence in Court. The result of this unfortunate misreading of the evidence, in the opinion of the High Court, was that the evidence of an important witness like Ramdeo Ram had not received proper consideration at the hands of the trial Judge. The contradictions found by the trial Court in the evidence of Fuljharia, P. W. 9 was also not considered by the High Court to be material as in its view such contradictions had no bearing on the manner of the occurrence but could