Owning a decree that cancels someone else's sale deed is not the same as owning the right to throw that person out of the house. The Allahabad High Court's Lucknow Bench made that distinction count for a woman who had lived in her home for 38 years, even though the deed her possession traced back to had long since been judicially cancelled.
The underlying dispute began decades earlier with a registered power of attorney executed in favour of one Augustine Paul. That power of attorney was purportedly cancelled, though the revocation came to be registered only some days after the cancellation itself. In the gap between the two dates, Augustine Paul went ahead and executed a sale deed in favour of Savitri Srivastava, who was the mother-in-law of the first appellant, Rekha Saxena. The sale deed, in other words, was executed in a window where the seller's authority to act was already in question, which is precisely what the Roman Catholic Diocese of Allahabad later challenged in the civil suit that followed.
That suit was decreed ex-parte as far back as 21 April 2001, but the decree itself was formally drawn up only on 7 April 2023, more than two decades later. What the decree actually said mattered a great deal to the appeal. It cancelled the 1987 sale deed and restrained further construction on the property. It contained no direction at all for eviction, and no order for delivery of possession to the decree-holder.
Armed with that decree, the Diocese nonetheless moved to take possession, and Rekha Saxena and her minor daughter sought a temporary injunction before the Civil Judge (Senior Division), Raebareli, to stop them. The trial court rejected the injunction application, which is what brought the matter up to the Lucknow Bench on an appeal under Order XLIII Rule 1(r) of the Code of Civil Procedure.
Justice Prashant Kumar reversed that rejection. The core of his reasoning was that a decree confined to cancelling a sale deed, without any accompanying direction for eviction or delivery of possession, simply does not authorise the decree-holder to remove the person in occupation. Possession and title are distinct questions, and a court granting relief limited to the latter cannot be read as having silently decided the former as well.
The judge also gave weight to the sheer length of the appellants' possession, treating a person in long and settled occupation, here stretching back 38 years to the original 1987 transaction, as having made out a prima facie case for interim protection even where the deed underlying that possession has since been set aside by a court. Due process, the judge said, required the rightful owner to approach a court for actual possession rather than rely on self-help once the sale deed was cancelled.
A practical lesson follows for anyone holding a decree of this kind is to read its operative portion with care before acting on it. A decree that cancels a document is not interchangeable with a decree for possession, and a party who wants to actually recover the property needs to seek that specific relief, whether in the original suit or in a fresh proceeding, rather than assume that setting aside the paper trail is enough to walk back in and take the keys. The 22-year gap between the ex-parte decree of April 2001 and its formal drawing up only in April 2023 adds its own cautionary note for litigants on both sides. A decree-holder who waits that long to have the decree formally drawn up, and longer still to attempt execution, should not expect a court to treat the passage of time as irrelevant to the equities, particularly where the party in occupation has spent those decades treating the property as her own home. Delay of this magnitude invites exactly the kind of scrutiny the Lucknow Bench applied here. The ruling also reinforces a basic separation that sometimes gets blurred in practice between a suit to cancel a document and a suit for possession. The Diocese's original suit sought and obtained only the former, restraining further construction along with the cancellation, but never asked for a direction to deliver possession. Had it sought that relief and obtained it, the outcome on appeal would likely have looked very different, since an eviction direction squarely within the decree would have given the Diocese exactly the authority it tried to exercise here without one. For litigants drafting a plaint that challenges a sale deed where the defendant is also in possession, the safer course is to plead for possession as a distinct relief from the outset, rather than assume that cancelling the deed necessarily carries possession along with it. Where that relief was never sought, as happened here, the decree-holder is left to initiate fresh proceedings for possession, with the occupant's decades of settled possession standing as a real, and now judicially recognised, obstacle in the way.