Surendran vs Rent Controller and Others

Thomas, J.—The Petitioner is a tenant, against whom an order of eviction has been passed by a Rent Control Court on the ground u/s 11(3) of the Kerala Buildings (Lease and Rent Control) Act, 1965 (for short, the Act). The Petitioner challenged the order in appeal before the Appellate Authority. During the pendency of the appeal, landlord, who was the sole Respondent in appeal, died on 20th November 1987. His Counsel filed a memo in Court on 7th December 1987 intimating the death. The Petitioner (Appellant) filed an application on 15th December to implead the legal representatives of the deceased landlord. The application was dismissed by the Appellate Authority as barred by the time prescribed in Rule 10 of the Kerala Buildings (Lease and Rent Control) Rules, 1979 (for short, the Rules). Consequently, the appeal was held abated. The revision filed by the Petitioner did not help him. So he has filed this Original Petition under Article 227 of the Constitution of India.

The Petitioner adopted a two pronged strategy. He attacks Rule 10 as invalid being unjust, harsh and unreasonable. If Rule 10 survives that attack, he contends that it must be given a practical interpretation that date of death means date of knowledge of death so as to make the Rule fair and reasonable. The Petitioner had to give up the first strategy since his attack against the constitutional validity of the Rule cannot be countenanced in a petition filed under Article 227 of the Constitution of India. So he concentrated on the alternative strategy. Rule 10 of the Rules reads thus:

Every application for making the legal representative, or the legal representatives of a deceased person, party to a proceeding under the Act, shall be preferred within 15 days from the date of death of the person concerned.

If the application is not filed within the prescribed time, the consequence is abatement of the appeal. The delay in filing the application cannot be condoned u/s 5 of the Limitation Act, as held by a Full Bench of this Court Jokkim Fernandez v. Amina Kunhi Umma 1973 KLT 138. Nor can the Rent Control Court or the Appellate Authority exercise inherent powers to override the statutory provisions in this regard Sulekha Umma v. Kalaivani 1985 KLT 1015. Thus, there can be little dispute over the draconian character of Rule 10, if it is construed literally. Still, learned Counsel for the contesting Respondents advanced a vehement plea for giving literal interpretation to the Rule on the promise that the Rule making authority really intended the Rule to be understood literally. He sought justification for the aforesaid stand from the following facts: The corresponding Rule in the Kerala Buildings (Lease and Rent Control) Rules, 1959 (it was also numbered as Rule 10) required that the application for making the legal representatives as parties should be preferred within 15 days from the date of death of the person concerned. In 1961, the Government amended the said Rule by substituting the period with 30 days. In 1979, when the present Rules were formulated, the Government again switched back to the shorter period of 15 days. It is contended that the Government would have wished to conform to the legislative intent expressed through Section 24 of the Act that proceedings under the Act should be concise and brief and of short duration.

There can be little doubt that the delegated Rule making authority would have been conscious of the statutory intention that proceedings under the Act should not be protractive or time consuming. But that is hardly sufficient to infer that the legislative intent was to have strict and literal interpretation of the words "date of the death" in Rule 10. If a literal and strict interpretation is given to those words, it may have miserable consequences for one of the parties. Information regarding death of one of the parties need not necessarily reach the opposite party on the date of death or even after the lapse of some days, if not weeks. Instances are not far and few between when death of a person remains m obscurity or shrouded in mystery for days to come. It is not uncommon that the information regarding death of a person living in a far away place may reach his native village only after a few days or even weeks. If a landlord goes on a tour or pilgrimage to some foreign countries during the pendency of an appeal filed by a tenant against an order of eviction and by misfortune he dies in a foreign country it is quite likely that the information of his death reaches even in his home town after the lapse of more than fifteen days. Even if the tenant files the application for impleading the legal representatives of that landlord on the same day of his getting information about the death, what would happen if literal interpretation is given to Rule 10. If such information reaches the tenant after 15 days of death, is he to suffer an order of eviction without getting the opportunity to avail his statutory remedy of appeal for no fault on his part? But if a literal interpretation of Rule 10 alone is possible, such consequences cannot be averted and the tenant has to suffer it. It cannot be imagined that the legislature would have intended such harsh and rediculous consequences to be suffered by the tenant when it formulated Rule 10. The Rule making authority must be presumed to be aware of the legal position that Section 5 of the Limitation Act cannot be applied to rent control proceedings as held by the Full Bench of this Court in Jokkim Fernandez v. Amina Kunhi Umma 1973 KLT 138.

When laws are made by the representatives of the people, it is to be assumed that the law makers enact laws to safeguard justice, fair play and good reason, Section 22 of the Act makes the provisions of Section 146 and Order XXII of the CPC applicable to rent control proceedings "as far as possible". The legislative intent looms large from such a provision as Section 22 of the Act that despite the summary nature of the proceedings, despite the brevity of its duration, no party should suffer on account of the death of any other party. Order XXII Rule 10A casts a duty on the pleader to inform the Court about the death of his party as soon as he comes to know of it. This provision is to enable the Court to give notice of it to the other party. The provision presupposes that information regarding the death of a party need not be known even to his own pleader on the same day and that the opposite party is likely to be ignorant of it until he gets information. In the aforesaid background, it cannot be presumed that the legislative intent was to ignore the harsh consequences, absurdity and even injustice resulting from the inability of one party to come to know of the death of his opposite party within 15 days.

Sir Rupert Cross in "Statutory Interpretation" mentions about the basic rules of interpretatian at page 43 (1976 Edition). One such rule is that if the judge considers that the application of the words in their ordinary sense would produce absurd result, which cannot reasonably be supposed to have been the intention of the legislature, he may apply them in any secondary meaning which they are capable of bearing. Another rule is that a judge may read in words which he considers to be necessarily implied by words which are already in the statute. He has a limited power to add to, alter or ignore statutory words in order to prevent a provision from being unintelligible or absurd or totally unreasonable, unworkable or totally irreconcilable with the rest of the statute.

P.N. Bhagwati and E.S. Venkataramiah, JJ. (as Their Lordships then were) in K.P. Varghese Vs. Income Tax Officer, Ernakulam and Another, made the following observations:

The task of interpretation of the statutory enactment is not a mechanical task. It is more than mere reading of mathematical formula because few words possess the precision of mathematical symbols. It is an attempt to discover the intent of the legislature from the language used by it. It must always be remembered that language made is at best an imperfect instrument for the expression of human thoughts and it would be idle to expect every statutory provision to be drafted with divine prescience and perfect clarity. Courts, therefore, must eschew literalness in the interpretation of a statutory provision and construe the language having regard to the object and purpose which the legislature had in view in enacting the provision and in the context and the setting in which it occurs. Where the plain literal interpretation of a statutory provision produces a manifestly absurd and unjust result which could never have been intended by the legislature, the Court may modify the language used by the legislature.... The Court may also, in such a case, read into the statutory provision a condition which, though not expressed, is implicit as constituting the basic assumption underlying the statutory provision.

In this context, a few instances can be noticed when the Supreme Court read one or two words additionally in the context in order to make the provision less harsh and more effective eg. Raja Harish Chandra Raj Singh v. The Deputy Land Acquisition Officer and Anr. AIR 196l S.C. 1500, Madan Lal Vs. State of U.P. and Others, and Assistant Transport Commissioner, Lucknow and Others Vs. Nand Singh, . In those cases, the period of limitation for preferring the appeal under different statutes was to start from the date of order impugned. Supreme Court read it as commencing from the date of knowledge of the order or date of communication of the order. In my view, such a course can be adopted here also since the legislature would not have intended the harsh consequences or patent injustice to result in through a literal construction of Rule 10. Hence to achieve the real intent, the words in Rule 10 "date of death" can be read as "date of knowledge of death".

In this case, there is dispute between the parties as to the date of Petitioner''s knowledge about the death of the landlord. In the counter affidavit filed in this Court, it is averred that the Petitioner knew about the death, on the same day itself, whereas the Petitioner''s stand is that he knew about it only when the Counsel filed the memo in Court. This disputed point has to be determined by the Appellate Authority. I, therefore, quash the order of the Appellate Authority and direct it to take up the case and dispose of the application for impleadment of the legal representatives afresh, in the light of the interpretation given to Rule 10 as above. The Original Petition is disposed of as above.