Jagdish Raj vs H.P. State Agricultural and Rural Development Bank and Another

Deepak Gupta, J.—By means of this petition the petitioner has prayed that the learned Court below has wrongly rejected the prayer of the plaintiff for deferment of statement of Shri Rajender Chauhan, Manager of the bank and petitioner may be permitted to lead evidence to prove its case.

Briefly stated the facts of the case are that the petitioner filed a suit for permanent prohibitory injunction against the bank and its officials. The petitioner in his suit submitted that he had taken loan from the respondent-bank and mortgaged his property with the bank. His case was that the bank had fixed a date for auctioning the property of the petitioner without issuing him any notice and without giving him an opportunity to put forth his case. There is no allegation in the suit that the petitioner had not taken a loan or that the loan documents were tampered with. The respondents-defendants filed a written statement contesting the plea of the plaintiff on various grounds and on merits it was stated that the plaintiff had raised a loan of Rs. 4,00,000/- to purchase a truck which he had hypothecated with the bank and it was further submitted that despite this deed of hypothecation the petitioner had transferred the truck and according to the respondents at the time of filing written statement a sum of Rs. 16,24,996/- was due from the plaintiff. The plaintiff filed replication to the suit. He did not deny the facts that he had raised a loan nor did he question the rate of interest charged by the defendants. Parties led evidence and the evidence was closed. At the stage of arguments, the plaintiff filed an application seeking permission to lead additional evidence on the ground that he apprehended that the defendant bank may have made some alterations and tampered with the original records. This application was allowed and the plaintiff was permitted to lead evidence.

I fail to understand how such evidence could have been permitted to be led since a party can only be permitted to lead evidence on the issues framed and the pleas taken by a party. Nowhere in the pleadings was any issue raised that the bank had tampered with the loan documents. No such issue had also been framed. It is true that the order allowing additional evidence was not challenged by the bank but this Court cannot ignore the fact that such an order was a totally illegal order since a party could not be permitted to lead additional evidence which is totally irrelevant to the suit. Even otherwise, I find that the plaintiff summoned only Shri Rajinder Chauhan, Manager of the Bank, who came and made a statement that the record is not available with the Bank but with the enforcement department. A prayer was then made that the statement of this witness be deferred and he be directed to produce the original loan documents. The learned trial Court rightly held that when the witness had stated that the original loan documents were not with the bank and the documents were in possession of the police the proper prayer which should have been made on behalf of the plaintiff was that he be given an opportunity to summon the record alongwith witnesses from the office of the enforcement department. This prayer was not made.

Be that as it may, I am of the considered view that it is more than apparent that the application filed for leading additional evidence was an abuse of the process of the Court since such evidence does not relate to any of the issues framed in the suit nor does it arise out of the pleadings of the parties. Therefore, it was not necessary to in fact summon these witnesses.

It is submitted on behalf of the petitioner that the Court under Order 16 Rule 14 is not power less and can summon any witness. There can be no quarrel with this proposition of law that the Court had inherent powers to summon any person as a witness. However, the evidence must be relevant for the decision of the suit. In this case, the application of the petitioner was allowed without even taking into consideration the fact whether the evidence which he wanted to prove was relevant for deciding the suit. Therefore, I find no merit in the petition, which is accordingly rejected. No order as to costs.