High Court Test 4
10 min40 WPM required633 words
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The plaintiff has filed the present suit for declaration of title and permanent injunction before this Court claiming that the disputed residential property admeasuring approximately twelve hundred square yards and bearing house number fourteen in the civil lines area of the city was originally purchased by his late father from the original owner in the year nineteen seventy-five through a registered sale deed duly executed before the Sub-Registrar of the district and that the plaintiff's family has been in continuous, peaceful, and open possession and enjoyment of the said property as its undisputed owner from the date of the sale deed until the defendant wrongfully began to interfere with the plaintiff's possession and rights earlier this year. The plaintiff further claims that the defendant, who is his paternal cousin and with whom the plaintiff's branch of the family has had no close contact for nearly two decades following a dispute over the partition of ancestral property, has no title, right, interest, or other legally cognisable claim over the disputed property and has wrongfully, forcibly, and without any legal basis interfered with the plaintiff's possession by raising a boundary wall on the plaintiff's side of the property boundary, installing an iron gate with a lock that prevents the plaintiff's tenants from accessing a portion of the property, and has made threats to the plaintiff and members of his household that he intends to dispossess them altogether on the basis of a document of dubious provenance and authenticity. The defendant, appearing through his learned counsel, has filed a detailed written statement denying the plaintiff's title to the property and putting forward his own claim of ownership based alternatively on adverse possession, asserting that regardless of whatever title the plaintiff's father may have acquired through the alleged sale deed in nineteen seventy-five, the defendant and his father before him have been in open, notorious, exclusive, continuous, hostile, and uninterrupted actual possession and enjoyment of the disputed property or at least a substantial portion thereof for a period well exceeding the twelve years prescribed for the extinguishment of the original owner's title and the vesting of title in the adverse possessor under the law of limitation. The defendant further contends that the plaintiff's father never actually took physical possession of the property after the execution of the sale deed, that the defendant's family has been paying property tax on the said property continuously for over two decades, that the property has been mutated in the revenue records in the name of the defendant's father and subsequently in the defendant's own name, and that the plaintiff is estopped from asserting title after such a long period of acquiescence in the defendant's possession. The plaintiff has filed in evidence the original registered sale deed of nineteen seventy-five, certified copies of the revenue record entries reflecting his father's name as the recorded owner, electricity and water connection documents in the names of his tenants, rent receipts, and an affidavit of a neighbour who has resided adjacent to the property for over thirty years and who deposes that the plaintiff's family has always been recognised in the locality as the owner. This Court has carefully evaluated all the oral and documentary evidence presented by both parties, has heard the learned counsel at considerable length on the law of adverse possession as it has evolved in recent Supreme Court judgments, and has reached the clear conclusion that the plaintiff has successfully established title to the property through the registered sale deed of nineteen seventy-five, that the defendant has not made out the stringent requirements for adverse possession, and that the plaintiff is entitled to the reliefs of declaration of title and permanent injunction restraining the defendant from interfering with the plaintiff's possession. A decree accordingly is passed in favour of the plaintiff.