The main legal point established in the judgment is that applications to set aside a sale under Rule 89, Order 21, Civil P.C. must be made within the specified time limit, and failure to do so may result in the confirmation of the sale.

Hallifax, A J C—The first respondeat Krishna Rao attached certain immovable property belonging to the second respondent Datttatray in execution of a decree, and it was sold by auction to the appellant Kabiruddin for Rs. 1,600 on 2nd May 1924. The purchase-money was paid within the time allowed by law. On the day after the sale the judgment-debtor filed an application praying that the sale should be set aside under Rule 90, Order 21, Civil P.C. on the ground of material irregularity in publishing it. With the details of the alleged irregularity we are not now concerned.

2. The Courts were closed for the summer vacation from 11th May to 15th June and on 16th June the judgment-debtor filed an application to have the sale set aside under Rule 89, Order 21. This was accompanied by a deposit of Rs. 800 for payment to the auction purchaser and a receipt signed by the decree-holder acknowledging full satisfaction of the decree. The deposit and the application must be considered, in respect of limitation, to have been made on 11th May, but it may be mentioned that the deposit of the Rs. 800 was actually made on 2nd June, which was a Monday and therefore counts as the thirtieth day from 2nd May, the date of the sale.

3. There has been a sad waste of time and effort over pleas such as that the decree was not really satisfied on 29th May, though the decree-holder said it was, and the judgment-debtor also said so on the following day, and that all that happened on that day was an agreement between the decree-holder and the judgment-debtor and a third person for the payment of the money on some future day, which was eventually carried out, and that Rule 89, Order 21, was not satisfied by an acknowledgment of full payment by the decree-holder but required the production of the money in Court. If the decree-holder says his decree is satisfied, it is satisfied and nobody else is concerned with the manner of that satisfaction, whether it is cash or kind or promises or kindness.

4. Taken by itself then the judgment-debtor's application under Rule 89, was well within time and had to be granted. But he had already made an application under Rule 90, and till that was withdrawn he was not ''entitled to make or prosecute'' an application under Rule 89. That withdrawal was not actually made till 25th July. It is urged that the withdrawal ought to relate back to the date of the making of the application under Rule 89, which should be regarded as itself a sort of automotic withdrawal. That would be impossible according to the plain words of Rule 89, but anyhow there was more here than the absence of an express withdrawal; there was an express refusal to withdrawal.

5. The judgment-debtor drew up two applications on 31st May, of which one was actually presented at once and the other was apparently held up till 16th June. In the first he asked to be allowed to deposit Rs. 800 for payment to Kabiruddin in oase his first application is disallowed.'' In his second petition of 31st May, which is the same at slightly greater length, he said that if his application under Rule 90 succeeded, he would be satisfied (to thik bat), but otherwise he prayed that the Rs. 800 might be paid to Kabiruddin, and he repeated that it his previous application succeeded he would withdraw the money himself.

6. Even on 25th July there appears to have been some attempt in Court to keep the first application alive before it was withdrawn. But, in view of the words of these two petitions, it is quite impossible, by the use of any legal fiction or any stretch of the imagination, to find that the application under Rule 90 was withdrawn till after 16th June, to take the earliest possible date. The application under Rule 89 was therefore not made till after 16th June, because ii could not be either ''made or prosecuted'' till then, and that is more than thirty days after the date of the sale.

7. The only facts with which we are concerned then are that property was sold in execution of