JUDGMENT

Mears, C.J. - There is no doubt that you and the counsel who have represented the respondent have acted wisely in the course which has been followed. We wish this case to be clearly understood and not to be twisted into something quite different from the reality. It is not a case in which we have asked the respondent to come forward and to justify a pleading which he had a perfect right to make; it is a case of quite a different nature. A client who consults a counsel and who requires a plaint or written statement to be drafted instructs the counsel as to the facts of the desired document. It unfortunately does not always happen that those facts are true, but from the counsel's point of view that is not a material matter, and indeed, if one looks at pleadings in cases generally, it is obvious that a plaint and the written statement cannot both be true because an issue or issues arise out of the denials of the truth of the averments on one side or the other and that enables the case to be fought upon clear lines. A counsel is entitled to accept the instructions of the client subject to this, that, as a matter of prudence and for one's own reputation, it is not well to associate oneself with reckless charges of fraud and criminality or to indulge in abuse; and counsel should explain to clients that these charges, if unproved, gravely injure the case, and prejudice the Judge. Counsel is not supposed to go hunting here, there and everywhere to test by extraneous circumstances the veracity of his client. It cannot be done, nor is it the practice to do it. Counsel have to depend upon the statement that the client makes, the penalty being that, if the client is not telling the truth, he may probably lose the ease. In those circumstances the rule is that the client is entitled to have the particular document drafted according to the instructions given. But that is not the case here in the slightest degree. This case is, as set out in the order calling upon the respondent to show cause, a charge that he maliciously drafted the third written statement at a time when he had the fullest and most abundant proof, as it happened, that those statements ought not to be repeated, and had to his knowledge no foundation in fact. It is part of the Crown's case that the respondent had some cause for feeling a grievance with Mr. Indar Prasad, and that ho sought this method, under the protection of what he supposed to be a privileged document, for maliciously taking the opportunity of insulting and defaming Mr. Indar Prasad and alleging criminal acts against him. To our minds the written statement, although there has been a long discussion about it, except for the passage about the Fingerprint Bureau which may well be regarded as a dishonest statement, is not so important as the question put to Mr. Indar Prasad by the respondent as to Section 476. We think, however, that there is a good deal to be said on the ground of the written statement being a malicious document.

2. Mr. Indar Prasad went into the box for the third time in this series of cases, and for the fifth time on the question of promissory notes of husband or wife, and on the fifth occasion when he was in the box (he having been successful in all the four previous cases) the respondent, knowing perfectly well that there was not the slightest shadow of foundation for the allegation, said to this Mukhtar in open Court : "Did you not have a notice served on you u/s 476 in Mt. Chillo's case?" Mr. Indar Prasad quite truthfully said, "No." That was a wicked thing to ask of a man of the same type of profession, in his own native town, a man who was probably finding it quite hard enough to make a livelihood, when Raj Bahadur knew full well that no notice had been served because he himself had been the counsel for Mt. Chillo in the execution proceedings and in the appeal out of which the notice was suggested to have been served.

3. That was an unprovoked, unfounded attack, an attack that no l