Court throws out case, no one could understand

NEW DELHI: Anyone dealing with India’s overburdened legal system knows that the wheels of justice move slowly. But in one case, they have ground to a halt completely after Supreme Court judges said they were throwing out a lawsuit that used so much jargon it was incomprehensible. “We will have to set it aside because one cannot understand this,” the Hindustan Times daily quoted MB Lokur and Deepak Gupta as saying yesterday.

Even the lawyers representing the two sides in the row between a landlord and his tenant said they were unable to understand the original order issued by a lower court. “We normally prepare an appeal in two days’ time. However, in this case I took more than a week because the facts of the case were unclear,” the landlord’s lawyer, EC Agrawala, told the Hindustan Times. The property dispute dates back to 1999 when the landlord filed a petition to evict his tenant for not paying rent.

In a nearly two-decade struggle, the landlord finally took his matter to the country’s top court after the Himachal Pradesh High Court favored the tenant. But even that much would be hard to glean from the original order. “(The)... tenant in the demised premises stands aggrieved by the pronouncement made by the learned Executing Court upon his objections constituted there before... where within the apposite unfoldments qua his resistance to the execution of the decree stood discountenanced by the learned Executing Court,” it read. —AFP