Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J. - The pathology of litigative addiction ruins the poor of this country and the Bar has a role to cure this deleterious tendency of parties to launch frivolous and vexatious cases.

2. Here is an audacious application by a determined engineer of fake litigations asking for special leave to appeal against an order of the High Court on an interlocutory application for injunction. The sharp practice or legal legerdemain of the petitioner, who is the son of the 2nd respondent, stultifies the court process and makes decrees with judicial seals brutum fulmen. The long arm of the law must throttle such litigative caricatures if the confidence and credibility of the community in the judicature is to survive. The contempt power of the Court is meant for such persons as the present petitioner. We desist from taking action because of the sweet reasonableness of counsel Sri Remasesh.

3. What is the horrendous enterprise of the petitioner? The learned Judge has, with a touch of personal poignancy, judicial sensitivity and anguished anxiety, narrated the sorry story of a long-drawn out series of legal proceedings revealing how the father of the petitioner contested an eviction proceeding, lost it, appealed against it, lost again, moved a revision only to be rebuffed by summary rejection by the High Court. But the Judge, in his element jurisdiction, gratuitously granted over six months time to vacate the premises. After having enjoyed the benefit of this indulgence the maladroit party moved for further time to vacate. All these proceedings were being carried on by the 2nd respondent who was the father of the petitioner. Finding that the courts generosity had been exploited to the full, the 2nd respondent and the petitioner, his son, set upon a clever adventure by abuse of the process of the court. The petitioner filed a suit before the Fourth Additional First Munsif, Bangalore, for a declaration that the order of eviction, which had been confirmed right up to the High Court and resisted by the 2nd respondent throughout, was one obtained by fraud and collusion. He sought an injunction against the execution of the eviction order. When this fact was brought to the notice of the High Court, during the hearing of the prayer for further time to vacate, instead of frowning upon the fraudulent stroke, the learned Judge took pity on the tenant and persuaded the landlord to give more time for vacating the premises on the basis that the suit newly and sinisterly filed would be withdrawn by the petitioner. Gaining time by another five months on this score, the father and son belied the hope of the learned Judge who thought that the litigative skirmishes would come to an end, but hope can be dupe when the customer concerned is a crook.

4. The next chapter in the litigative acrobatics of the petitioner and father soon followed since they were determined to dupe and defy the process of the court to cling on to the shop. The trick they adopted was to institute another suit before another Munsif making a carbon copy as it were of the old plaint and playing upon the likely gullibility of the new Munsif to grant an ex parte injunction. The 1st respondent entered appearance and exposed the hoax played upon the court by the petitioner and the 2nd respondent. Thereupon the Munsif vacated the order of injunction he had already granted. An appeal was carried without success. Undaunted by all these defeats the petitioner came to the High Court in revision and managed to get an injunction over again. The 2nd respondent promptly applied for vacating the temporary injunction and when the petition came up for hearing before Mr. Justice Venkataramayya, counsel for the petitioner submitted that he should not hear the case, the pretext put forward being that the petitioner had cutely mentioned the name of the Judge in the affidavit while describing the prior proceedings. The unhappy Judge, who had done all he could to help the tenant by persuading the l