Allahabad HC Orders Action Against Trial Judge For Favouring Party To Illegally Gain In Property Case

The Allahabad High Court termed a recent judgment passed by a Trial Court in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, “blatant, dishonest, and illegal”, and a case of “daylight judicial murder”. The trial court judge, according to the High Court, purposefully ignored the death certificate of the land owner and passed the order to cause illegal gain to the plaintiff-respondent, Indra Mohan Sachdev. Justice Sandeep Jain set aside the order that granted ownership of a valuable industrial plot in Ghaziabad to the plaintiff-respondent Indra Mohan Sachdev through an ex parte decree against a woman who had been dead for over two decades. The decree compelled the Nagar Nigam Ghaziabad to mutate property records in the respondent’s favour.

Sachdev (Plaintiff-respondent) filed a suit before the trial court against the defendant-appellant Ghaziabad Municipal Corporation, claiming ownership of the land in dispute based on the ex parte decree. He prayed for no eviction from the said plot as the decree was final, and he had been paying property tax for the property.

The decree allegedly declared him the owner through adverse possession against the owner (Smt. Sushila Mehra) in the records. Sachdev argued that since 2022, he has been paying the  property taxes and thus, the municipal corporation was legally bound to register his name in their property records. The municipal corporation refused to change the record and recorded it as "Muraga Khana". Having noticed the suspicion of authorities toward the decree, Sachdev filed a suit. In 2025, a trial court in Ghaziabad ordered the mutation in Sachdev’s favour.  

Arguments

The municipal corporation appealed against the ruling, arguing that the 2022 decree was void because it was passed against a dead person. It provided the evidence that the owner, “Sushila Mehra,” died in April 1996, around 25 years before the original suit was filed against her. The counsel representing the municipal corporation argued that Sachdev’s father was a tenant who paid rent to Mehra and that under the law, a tenant cannot claim ownership through adverse possession against the landlord. Adverse possession is a legal process in which a person who possesses someone else’s property for a long period acquires legal ownership based on continuous possession.

Notably, Sachdev’s counsel admitted that Mehra died in 1996 but argued that the plaintiff (Sachdev) was not aware of her death at the time of the initial suit.

Court Observation

The High Court observed that the trial judge relied on the void decree blindly and arbitrarily rejected Mehra’s death certificate as “inadmissible” because it was a photocopy.

The court said, “It is pertinent to mention here that death and birth certificates are never filed in the original because they always remain with the person concerned or his/her legal heirs, and in a judicial or quasi-judicial proceeding, only a true copy of them is filed. It is further pertinent to mention here that the defendants, being the 3rd parties, could never have benefited from filing the false death certificate of Sushila Mehra. In view of this, there was no justifiable reason for the trial court to ignore the copy of the death certificate of Sushila Mehra.”

The court noted that the mutation in revenue records is only for fiscal purposes and does not establish an independent title. The court called the trial court judge’s ignoring Mehra’s death certificate “shocking, perverse, and tainted with extraneous considerations”. It also observed that a tenant entering a property has to hand over the vacant possession and cannot deny the title of the landlord.

Court Judgment

The High Court allowed the appeal and dismissed Sachdev’s suit with costs. It rules the order passed by the trial court as “legally unsustainable”. The court also ordered the case file to be placed before the Chief Justice for appropriate administrative action against the trial judge for passing such a blatant order.