Al. Vr. St. Veerappa Chettiar vs State Of Madras And Anr. on 5 February, 1954

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

Court: Supreme Court of India

Case Number: Not extracted

Decision Date: 5 February, 1954

Coram: B.K. Mukherjea, Ghulam Hasan

In this matter, the appellant, Al. Vr. St. Veerappa Chettiar, filed a consolidated appeal challenging a decision of a Division Bench of the Madras High Court dated 13 December 1951. That earlier judgment had dismissed three separate writ petitions that the appellant had presented under Article 226 of the Constitution, seeking appropriate writs against the State of Madras. The appellant owned a zamindari estate situated in the district of Mathurai and also possessed an under-tenure in the district of Ramanathapuram, both locations being within the State of Madras. Following the enactment of the Madras Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwardi) Act of 1948, the State of Madras issued a notification on 23 August 1949 declaring the appellant’s under-tenure to be covered by the provisions of that Act. A similar notification concerning the zamindari estate was issued on 9 December 1950. The three writ applications sought to restrain the State from proceeding under the Madras Estates Act of 1948 with respect to both the zamindari estate and the under-tenure, and also asked that any proceedings already commenced be set aside. All three applications were disposed of by a single judgment of the Madras High Court on 13 December 1951, which dismissed them. The appellant now appealed that dismissal to this Court.

The Court observed that the present appeal is essentially identical to the issue decided in the case of Zamindar of Ettayapuram v. State of Madras, AIR 1954 SC 257, whose judgment had just been delivered. The critical question was whether the compensation provisions contained in Madras Act 26 of 1948 were invalid because they represented a colourable exercise of legislative power under the Constitution Act of 1935. The Court reiterated that the appellant could not raise this contention, since there was no corresponding entry in any of the legislative lists of the Government of India Act, 1935, that matched Entry 42 of List III in the present Constitution, and because the guarantee provided by Section 299(2) of the 1935 Act was unavailable to the appellant under Article 31(6) of the Constitution. Counsel for the appellant pointed out that no compensation had been granted for a large number of under-tenures. Nevertheless, the Court held that it was powerless to grant relief, being bound by the express limitation in Article 31(6) of the Constitution. Consequently, the Court concluded that the appeal must be dismissed.

In the final part of the judgment the Court recorded that it had decided to dismiss the appeal, but it expressly indicated that it would not make any order directing either party to pay the costs of the other. This expression meant that the parties would each be responsible for their own legal expenses incurred in the proceedings, and that no monetary liability for costs would be imposed by the judgment. By stating “but without any order as to costs,” the Court clarified that while the substantive relief sought by the appellant was denied, the procedural question of cost allocation was left untouched, leaving the parties to bear their own costs.