In a rare order, the Madras High Court has requested Advocate General (A-G) R. Shunmugasundaram to consider whether he should file an application before the court under the Vexatious Litigation (Prevention) Act of 1949 to prevent a litigant, Azizul Karim of Mannadi in Chennai, from instituting any proceeding, either civil or criminal, before any court in the State.
Justices Paresh Upadhyay and D. Bharatha Chakravarthy were convinced that the litigant was prima facie in the habit of filing vexatious litigations before various courts in the State and such action warrants invocation of the 1949 Act. However, since the law empowers only the A-G to make an application under it, they left it to the top law officer to take a final call.
“We clarify that our observations are prima facie in nature and in the event the learned Advocate-General arrives at the satisfaction that such an application need not be filed, our observations will not bind him leaving it open to the respondents of these appeals to take recourse to the remedy available to them under the law,” the second Division Bench clarified.
The orders were passed while dismissing a couple of appeals preferred by the litigant against an interim order passed in his 2017 civil suit. The order under challenge had been passed by a single judge who had directed the Registry to club the 2017 suit along with two connected civil suits that the litigant had filed before the City Civil Court with regard to a property dispute.
Though the judges were about to dismiss the appeal on September 22 itself, the appellant’s counsel sought a day’s time to get instructions from his client on withdrawing it. Thereafter, the counsel did not appear at all though the appeal was listed on multiple occasions. When an attempt was made to call him, the phone number in the case bundle turned out to be that of the appellant.
The judges also found the appellant had come to adverse notice of a single judge of the High Court on the criminal side in August 2021 because he had been accused of attempting to grab a valuable property spread over 2,163 square feet in Mannadi by preparing forged documents. The litigant had filed as many as 14 cases before various courts in connection with the property.
He had also been accused of forging court orders and was facing criminal cases in that regard. During the hearing before the single judge, the police had informed the court that the appellant was a notorious person and that he was in possession of a fake identity card supposedly issued by the Registrar General of the High Court identifying him as a judicial officer.
He was also reportedly in possession of morphed photographs showing him to be in the company of a few judges. Taking serious note of such seizures, the single judge had ordered a thorough investigation into his activities by an officer in the rank of Assistant Commissioner of Police.
