JUDGMENT.-This revision is under section 25 of the Tamil Nadu Buildings (Lease and Rent Control) Act, 1960. It is brought by the tenant of a nonresidential building in Madras City. What he is up against is an order of. eviction passed by the Rent Controller on a petition filed by the landlord for personal occupation of the premises. The Rent Controller passed the order ex parte. And it was confirmed in appeal.

2. The validity of the ex parte eviction order is questioned in this revision. Mr. Grovind Swaminathan appears for the tenant. He argues that the order is a nullity.

3. The nullity argument, as elaborated by learned counsel, was not so much on the ex parte nature of the order as on the terms of the order itself. Mr. Govind Swaminathan did not for instance, say that under the Act all ex parte orders must be held to be nullities. Nor did he claim that this particular proceeding setting his client ex parte was not warranted by the circumstances. This latter ground could not, in any case, have been advanced in the present proceedings pursued by the tenant for getting the ex parte order set aside, his plea of “sufficient cause” failed to carry conviction with the Rent Controller as well as the higher tribunals.

4. This revision, then, has been argued accepting the position that the Rent Controller acted aright and within the law when he set the tenant ex parte and proceeded to dispose of the eviction petition in his absence. Even so, according to the argument, the order of eviction is a nullity.

5. Mr. Govind Swaminathan invited me to read the order first, before he addressed his criticism on it. The order, as it happens, is a short one. It is reproduced below, verbatim:

“Respondent absent. No representation. Set ex parte. P.W. 1 examined . Eviction ordered with costs”.

Learned counsel, if I remember right, said something unflattering about the brevity of the order. But that could only have been an aside. He did not mean to say that because the order was short, the law must, on that account, regard it as nasty and brutish. I myself could hardly abide the order’s staccato prose. And I think I said that judicial writing has no business to be telegraphic. But Mr. Govind Swaminathan did not adopt this line of argument either. His client, evidently, had no mind, at the moment, to indulge in literary criticism. His grievance was much more substantial. Here was a case, learned counsel, said, where the Rent Controller’s jurisdiction was invoked to evict a tenant with a view to accommodating the landlord in the premises. The jurisdiction in such cases and the manner of its exercise are clearly drawn in the Act by section 10(3)(e). Eviction of a tenant, tinder this provision, can be ordered only if the Rent Controller were “satisfied” that the landlord’s claim in that regard is “bona fide”. The section, according to Mr. Govind Swaminathan, makes the Rent Controller’s satisfaction a necessary pre-condition on the fact of which, and on the foot of which alone, an order for eviction can properly follow. Now, what is the position in the present case asked learned counsel, turning to the order in question. All we gain from it, he said, is the knowledge that the Rent Controller set the tenant ex parte for non-appearance and went on to record such evidence as P.W. 1 gave in the witness box. Beyond these, the order says nothing except to announce, abruptly, that the tenant is ordered to be evicted. It does not say that eviction was being ordered because the Rent Controller was satisfied that the landlord’s claim was bona fide. The result, according to Mr. Govind Swaminathan, is that his client was evicted contrary to the provisions of section 10(2)(e) of the Act. He was evicted in the absence of the statutory condition, the presence of which alone could have given validity to the order. In this sense, learned counsel said, the order was a nullity.

6. Mr. Kesava Iyengar, appearing for the landlord, supported the order. He said that the order was as va

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