Krishna Iyer, J. - (1.) There is more than meets the eye in the seemingly simple legal issue raised in this ejectment suit, if we probe the deeper public and professional implications of the limitations on a pleader's implied power to enter into a compromise of a case bona fide on behalf of his client, but in his interest, although without his consent.
(2.) The facts, to use trite phraseology, fall within a narrow compass. The landlords, Respondents 1 to 3, brought an action for eviction of the tenant-appellant (Regular Suit 141 of 1964) under the rent control law extant in Maharashtra. Litigation is often so harassingly long that even where recovery of possession is sought for Immediate bona fide need of the owner, the judicial process takes its slow motion course that settlement of the dispute is not infrequently preferred by both sides to protracted adjudicatory justice. In the present case, although parties had engaged lawyers and gone to trial, they took several adjournments from Court to compose their differences. The last such was granted in these terms: "19-4-1965 Parties as before present. "Application by defendant for adjournment granted. Suit is adjourned for hearing to 21-4-1965. Sd/- R. H. Maslekar. Joint Civil Judge Junior Division." Eventually, on April 21, 1965 the Court recorded a compromise, signed by the pleader of the tenant, giving 18 months' time to give vacant possession and decreed the suit on the agreed terms. But at heart the tenant harboured the intent to resist eviction; the impropriety of breaching the compromise was overpowered by the tempting plea of the illegality of the decree on consent. So he started some miscellaneous proceedings which were carried right upto this Court although dismissed in every Court as incompetent. Then he inaugurated this, the third chapter of litigation. Regular Civil Suit No. 422 of 1966 for a declaration that the decree based on a compromise entered into by his pleader without authority was not binding on him and consequentially he was not liable to be dispossessed. This last spell of litigation, after the first compromise in Court has taken long ten years. Socio-legal research may well prove that legal justice may soon reach a point of no return if fundamental structural reform of the whole forensic process were not launched upon and frivolous litigation screened so as not to discredit faith in Court justice. Anyway in the present case, the hierarchy of Courts has held against the appellant and he has come up, by special leave, conscious of adverse findings of fact by Courts below, to this Court. The only point urged by Shri Limaye for the appellant is that Respondent 4 the pleader, Shri Palshikar, who signed the razi had no authority to do so, especially because the client's consent so to do had not been secured and an advocate - respondent 5 before us - had also been retained in the case who had neither signed the document nor represented to the Court about the settlement. It is common case that the tenant was absent in Court although his litigation agent was present (and consented) when the order was made. Shri Limaye has raised the principal plea that Respondent 4, being a mere pleader, had no power to compromise the suit unless expressly authorised by the party and here admittedly no such express authorisation existed. He seemed to make a distinction between advocate and pleader although at some stages he read this limitation as applicable to advocates too. A second point faintly raised was prudently abandoned for the reason that it had not been set up in the pleadings or urged at earlier stages. Last minute ingenuity is not fairplay in Court and we cannot and did not permit him to argue that the Court had no material in the recitals of the compromise to make out the mandatory grounds required under the relevant 'rent control' law for a Court to direct dispossession of a tenant of a building. We do not examine the merits of the contention at all.
(3.) Now to the only contention canvassed before us. Although vintage rulings and relevant books have been cited and voyages to Anglo-American legal systems made, we have to decide the issue in the light of Indian statute law and decisions against the backdrop of Indian condition. Foreign aid is helpful but in law, as in life, Indian genius must speak. In this perspective, first we have to look at the pertinent provisions of the Civil Procedure Code, the Advocates Act and the Bombay Pleaders Act.;