Recently, there has been a popular joke with the tagline ‘India is not for beginners’ doing rounds all over the internet. The joke aims at a portrayal of how normal it has become for totally bizarre incidents to pop up every now and then around the nation, and rightfully so, because this phenomenon seems to be in no mood of stopping anytime soon.
In yet another totally unheard of case, The Delhi High Court on Thursday dismissed a totally weird case, calling it a sheer wastage of the legal resources of the court and the country. The case was filed by the litigant, Kunwar Mahendra Dhwaj Prasad Singh, an alleged decendant of a former ‘Raja’, claiming property rights over land running across 4 states!
The plea saw Kunwar asserting his rights over all the land between Ganga and Yamuna, stretching all the way from Agra to Meerut. This land encompassed a total of 65 revenue states in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand, and the national capital of Delhi. The case, now dismissed came along with a staggeringly high 1 lakh rupees, and if that weren’t enough, Singh had filed a similar case in the month of December where he sought government intervention for the claimed territory, and that time got away with a cost of 10,000 INR.
This time, the prince argued that the land he is claiming for belongs to the “Princely State of Beswan family.” He further added that due to the absence of a formal accession agreement with the Indian government, the Union of India’s governance over the territory was and is an infringement. The court, shocked at the audacity of Singh’s appeal, came furious on the litigant, calling him being awfully late, asking him whether he had been sleeping all these years and ultimately, dismissing the plea with a heavy penalty.
The court said in its statement that such matters, firstly, cannot be resolved in writ proceedings and were matters for a civil court. On top of that, the bench highlighted that the claim was not only excessively delayed by 75 years, but also fell under the “principle of extinguishment,” which ultimately led to the dismissal of the appeal and the imposition of the huge fine.
