Case: Authorised Officer, Thanjavur and Another Vs. S. Naganatha Ayyar

The short point of law decided in the long judgment under appeal may justly be given short shrift. But the batch of Civil Revision Petitions allowed by the High Court involves a legal issue of deep import from the angle of agrarian reform and surplus land available for distribution under its scheme that we deem it proper to discuss the core question a t some length. If the statutory construction which found favour with the High Court be correct the risk of reform legislation being condemned to functional futility is great, and so the State has come up in appeal by Special Leave challenging the High Courts interpretation of s. 22 of the Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on land) Act, 1961 (for short, the Ceiling Act). Presently, we will set out the skeletal facts relating to the civil appeals and the scheme of t he Act designed for distributive justice in the field of agricultural land ownership, sufficient to disclose the purpose of the legislation, the mischief it intends to suppress, the reverse effect of the construction put on the key section (s. 22) in the judgment under appeal and the consequent stultification of the objective of the Ceiling Act. While dealing with welfare legislation of so fundamental a character as agrarian reform, the court must constantly remember that the statutory pilgrimage to destination social justice should be helped, and not hampered, by judicial interpretation. For, the story of agrarian re-distribution in Tamil Nadu, as elsewhere, has been tardy and zigzag, what with legislative delays, judicial stays and invalidations, followed by fresh constitutional amendments and new constitutional challenges and statutory constructions, holding up, for decades, urgent measures of rural economic justice whi ch was part of the pledges of the Freedom struggle. It is true that judges are constitutional invigilators and statutory interpreters; but they are also responsive and responsible to Part IV of the Constitution being one of the trinity of the nations appointed instrumentalities in the transformation of the socio-economic order. The judiciary in its sphere, shares the revolutionary purpose of the Constitutional order, and when called upon to decode social legislation must be animated by a goal-oriented approach. This is part of the dynamic of statutory intretation in the developing countries so that courts are not converted into rescue shelters for those who seek to defeat agrarian justice by cute transactions of many manifestations now so similar in the country and illustrated by the several cases under appeal. This caveat has become necessary because the judiciary is not a mere umpire, as some assume, but an activist catalyst in the constitutional scheme.The Ceiling Act, in its structure and process, follows the common pattern. The object is equitable distribution of land to the landless by relieving those who hold more than the optimum extent fixed by the law. The success of the scheme depend s on maximisation of surplus land to be taken over by the State from large landholders. The strategy of fixing a severe ceiling on land holdings was expected to be paralysed by anticipatory strategems by landholders and so the legislature sought t o outwit them and clamped down pre- emptive restrictions on transfer whereby the surplus takeover would be sabotaged, Chapter II prescribes the ceiling on land holdings and Chapter III proscribes certain types of deleterious transfers and future acquisitions. One such provision is s. 22 which falls for immediate dissection. The machinery for working out the scheme includes authorised officers defined in s. 3(5) of the Ceiling Act. The rest of the infrastructure for implementation of the statutory scheme is not material for our case nor the other chapters relating to compensation, exemptions and the like Chapter XI provides for appeals and revisions and the High Court, by virtue of s. 83 read with s. 115 of theCode of Civil Procedure, has jurisdiction to entertain revisions against orders of Land Tribunals which enjoy appellate powers over orders of authorised officers in the manner provided. The present appeals are against a common order of the High Court allowing several revision petitions under s. 115 C.P.C.Now, the respondents before us in the several appeals are persons whose transfers have been held void by the authorised officer and the land Tribunal but upheld b y the High Court on a narrow construction of s. 22 of the Ceiling Act. The alienations took many forms ranging from stridhana to bona fide sale but shared one common attribute that they were executed during the suspect spell, if one may say so, between the date of commencement of the Act and the notified date. The legislature, in its realistic anxiety and pragmatic wisdom, demarcated a lethal zone viz., the period between the two dates stated above when all landholders with lands in excess o f the ceiling would desperately salvage their surplus by resort to devices, some bona fide, some not, but all having the effect of frustrating the legislative objective of freezing holdings as on the date of commencement of the Act and seizing the surplus in terms of the Act for eventual equitable distribution, after payment of statutory compensation.

Court's reasoning:
Section 22, literally read leads only to one conclusion, that any transfer, bona fide executed or not, is liable to be declared void by the Authorised Officer "if he finds that the transfer defeats any of the provisions of this Act." There is not the slightest doubt t hat severally and cumulatively the provisions of the Act seek to make available the maximum extent of land, in excess of the ceiling, to be vested in Government for fulfilment of its purposes. Chapter II contains a fasciculus of provisions i n this behalf and if any transfer carves out of the surplus area some land, pro tanto, the provisions of the Act are defeated. Indeed, it is not seriously disputed that such will be the conclusion if we do not read into the provisions either the condition that it does not apply to bona fide transfers, as Shri Ramamurthy would have it, or does not apply to any transfers other than sham, nominal or bogus transfers, as the High Court would have it. A policy- oriented interpretation tallies with the literal construction in the present case. The mischief rule in Heydons case and the grammatical construction which is the Golden Rule converge to the same conclusion in the present caseSection 22, literally read leads only to one conclusion, that any transfer, bona fide executed or not, is liable to be declared void by the Authorised Officer "if he finds that the transfer defeats any of the provisions of this Act." There is not the slightest doubt t hat severally and cumulatively the provisions of the Act seek to make available the maximum extent of land, in excess of the ceiling, to be vested in Government for fulfilment of its purposes. Chapter II contains a fasciculus of provisions i n this behalf and if any transfer carves out of the surplus area some land, pro tanto, the provisions of the Act are defeated. Indeed, it is not seriously disputed that such will be the conclusion if we do not read into the provisions either the condition that it does not apply to bona fide transfers, as Shri Ramamurthy would have it, or does not apply to any transfers other than sham, nominal or bogus transfers, as the High Court would have it. A policy- oriented interpretation tallies with the literal construction in the present case. The mischief rule in Heydons case and the grammatical construction which is the Golden Rule converge to the same conclusion in the present caseWe consider the literal meaning of the Section to be that any transfer or other alienation mentioned in the Section which reduces or impairs the otherwise available extent of surplus land beyond the ceiling "defeats.. the provisions of this Act." This is the plain meaning of the Section which gives no room for doubt or justification for importation of any further condition like sham, bogus etc.A return to the rules of strict construction, when the purpose of the statute needs it, is desirable, especially with a view to give effect A to t he intention of the legislature. We are reminded of Lord Dennings interesting remarks in his recent book "The Discipline of Law" under heading "I am a Portia Man"In the interpretation of s. 22 we too are Portia men. For this reason we reverse the view of the High Court that s. 22 will not apply to nullify any transaction of transfer or partition unless it is further shown that it is sham, nominal or bogus. Nor do we agree with Shri Ramamurthy that even if a Transaction defeats the ceiling provisions, it may still be valid if the transfer is, from an individual point of view, bona fide. The short reply is that from the communitys angle, especially the landless communitys angle hungering for allotment, the alienation, however necessary for the individual, is not bona fide visa-vis the community.Therefore, we allow the appeal in the light of the interpretation we have adopted, restore the tribunals holding and rule that if any transfer defeats the provisions of the Act by reducing the extent of surplus lan d in excess of the ceiling available from any person such transaction bona fide or not, is void in the matter of computation of the permissible area and the surplus area. May be, that the transaction may be good for other purposes or may not be. The Authorised officer is within his power if he ignores it as void for purposes of s. 22, s. 7 and other ceiling- related provisions.