United Commercial Bank Ltd. vs Secretary, U.P. Bank Employees Union

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Not extracted

Decision Date: 19 September, 1952

Coram: Chief Justice, B.K. Mukherjea, Chandrasekhara Aiyar, Ghulam Hasan

In this matter, the Supreme Court recorded that the appeal had come before it on the basis of special leave having been granted. The Court noted that the Government of India had issued an order on 21-February-1950, which, under clause (c) of sub-section (1) of section 10 of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 (Act 14 of 1947), referred an industrial dispute to the Industrial Tribunal at Calcutta for adjudication. The order of 21-February-1950 made reference to two earlier government orders dated 13-June-1947 and 20-September-1949, which had referred other disputes; however, the Court observed that those earlier orders were not relevant to the present proceedings. The Court then set out the operative portion of the 21-February-1950 order, which declared that a further industrial dispute had arisen or was expected to arise after 13-June-1949 between the banking companies listed in Schedule I and their employees concerning matters enumerated in Schedule II. The Central Government, finding it desirable to refer the dispute for adjudication, exercised the powers conferred by clause (c) of sub-section (1) of section 10 and referred the matter to the Industrial Tribunal at Calcutta, which had been constituted under section 7 of the Act. Schedule II contained two items, the second of which was followed by a note stating that the list was not intended to be exhaustive. The first item identified “retrenchment, discharge, or dismissal of workmen after 13-June-1949.” Pursuant to the reference, identified as number 21 of 1950, the Industrial Tribunal at Calcutta issued directions on 24-February-1950 directing the appellant bank and its employees to file their statements of claim relating to the matters referred for adjudication by 15-March-1950. On 3-June-1950, the General Secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Bank Employees Union filed a petition before the Tribunal alleging victimisation of six employees, who are respondents 2 to 7 in the present appeal. The petition asserted that the employees’ services had been improperly terminated through a scheme whereby the newly appointed treasurer of the bank was induced to state that he had no confidence in those employees, whom he had not previously known, and that he wished to replace them with his own personnel. The Court observed that the petition contained other allegations, but those were deemed irrelevant for the purposes of the present appeal. The bank, for its part, contended that the terminations were not instances of victimisation but were the result of a sequence of events triggered by the resignation of the treasurership of the Agra Branch by the treasurers, Messrs Radhakishan Baijnath, which made the continued operation of the branch untenable due to the absence of a suitable new treasurer. The bank expressly repudiated the union’s allegation that the employees had been discharged because of their trade-union activities.

It was alleged that the employees had been discharged from service because of their trade-union activities. The Industrial Tribunal at Calcutta examined the matter and concluded that the respondents were indeed employees of the Bank and not merely nominees of the treasurer. The Tribunal held that ordering their discharge on the sole ground that the newly appointed treasurer, Sri Chundrimani, was unwilling to stand as their guarantor was legally untenable. Consequently, the Tribunal directed that the respondents be reinstated and awarded three months’ back pay together with the applicable allowances. The Bank appealed this decision to the Appellate Tribunal, but the appeal was unsuccessful.

In the present proceeding, counsel appearing for the Bank acknowledged that the respondents could be regarded as servants of the Bank rather than as the treasurer’s or the Chief Cashier’s nominees. He advanced two principal contentions. First, he questioned the Tribunal’s jurisdiction, arguing that the dispute could not have existed or been foreseen before 1-April-1950, the date on which the new treasurer, Sri Chundrimani, assumed his duties. Accordingly, the reference order dated 21-February-1950 could not have encompassed such a dispute, and the Tribunal therefore lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate it. He noted that Sri Chundrimani was appointed on 20-March and entered on duty on 1-April, while the termination of the respondents’ services occurred on that latter date; thus, the dispute, in his view, arose only at the moment of discharge. The second contention was that, even assuming jurisdiction and agreeing that the terminations were improper, the appropriate remedy should be compensation rather than reinstatement.

The Court observed that the phrase “apprehended dispute” in Section 10 of the Industrial Disputes Act raises several complex questions: whose apprehension—governmental, party, or otherwise—is intended; what the Tribunal must do if the apprehension does not mature into an actual dispute before it commences its duties; and whether the Tribunal is obliged to proceed on the basis of mere anticipation despite parties’ denial of a dispute. While acknowledging the significance of these questions, the Court indicated that they would not be settled in the present appeal for a specific reason to be explained. It further noted that the Bank had never raised the jurisdictional issue before the Industrial Tribunal. Had it been raised, the Court could have examined whether a dispute had actually arisen on the date of reference or at least been apprehended. Moreover, the employees submitted that, based on the Bank’s own admissions, a dispute had arisen earlier concerning the probable termination of the respondents’ services due to the resignation of the former treasurer and the difficulty of finding a replacement, which made the closure of the Agra Branch necessary; reference to this was made in the application dated 23-February-1950.

The record contains a reference to Annexure II, which appears on page 70 of the paper book and sets out the Bank’s application dated 23 February 1950 submitted to the Tribunal and signed by the General Manager. From this reference it becomes clear that the issue of whether the Tribunal possessed jurisdiction is not a purely legal question but is intertwined with the factual circumstances surrounding the case. Accordingly, the Bank may not be permitted, given the present circumstances, to raise the jurisdictional objection for the first time at the appellate stage. Regarding the second contention raised by the Bank, the Court finds that it lacks any substantive basis because that point was never presented in the petition for special leave filed before this Court. The question of whether a dismissed employee should be reinstated to his former position, or whether monetary compensation would constitute an adequate remedy, falls within the discretionary jurisdiction of the adjudicating authorities. The original Industrial Tribunal had concluded that reinstatement of the employee was the proper relief, and the Appellate Tribunal, on review, affirmed that conclusion. Consequently, this Court finds no grounds to interfere with the discretionary judgment exercised by the lower tribunals. As a result, the appeal is dismissed, and the appellant is ordered to bear the costs incurred by the respondents, assessed on a single-party basis.