Mumbai: In a significant ruling, the Bombay High Court on Friday held that the provisions of the Bombay Rent Act, which pertain to tenancy rights, would not be applicable to a joint family unit.
The court held that after the death of the original tenant, tenancy rights cannot be inherited by any member of the family of the deceased by claiming to be in a joint family set-up.
Putting an end to a decades-old legal battle, a bench of Justice Girish Kulkarni accordingly ordered a Pune-based family to hand over possession of the six rooms of a house to its original landlord.
The bench was seized with a plea filed by Vasant Joshi challenging the orders of a small causes court directing the Joshi family to hand over the premises to their landlord, Yeshwant Barve.
The court had passed the orders in 1997.Initially, the Joshis were a joint family and the head, Raghunath, had signed the tenancy agreement with the landlord in the 1930s.
However, after Raghunath's demise, the tenancy rights were inherited by his son Achyut, who left the premises. But Vasant continued to live there with his family, claiming to have inherited the tenancy rights from his cousin Achyut.
Vasant argued that tenancy rights can be inherited by any and every member of the joint family and thus urged Justice Kulkarni to set aside the 1997 ruling.
Having considered the contentions, Justice Kulkarni said, “From a plain reading of the rules, it is difficult to accept the contention as urged by Vasant that the provisions recognise that every member of the joint family or the joint family itself becomes a tenant under the Bombay Rent Act.”
“Thus, a tenant necessarily has to be a person (spouse, children, parents or children-in-law) and not otherwise, and certainly not a joint family as a unit. The legislature has avoided including in any such incident a joint family to be a tenant within the meaning of the rules,” Justice Kulkarni held.
The court said to allow a joint family or its members to inherit tenancy rights would lead to 'absurdity.'“In my opinion, such an assertion as made by Vasant would lead to absurdity and it would create an insurmountable uncertainty for the landlord in pursuing eviction proceedings against a tenant as permissible in law.”
“This, for the reason that when a landlord grants the premises on tenancy, it is a contract of the tenancy as entered with a specific person (tenant). The landlord expects fulfilment of legal obligations from the tenant.
The law, therefore, does not envisage that the landlord would be required to deal with all members of the joint family, a situation as in the present case,” Justice Kulkarni ruled.
The court further said that if such an argument is accepted then the landlord would never obtain an eviction of a tenant as every successive member of the tenant’s family would start claiming legal rights and protection under the provisions of the Bombay Rent Act. “Such can never be the object and intention of this rent legislation,” the court ruled.
