Hyderabad: Shocked at the number of litigations filed over a nine-acre prime land at Kandikal in Rangareddy district by a chronic litigant, who was hell-bent on grabbing govt land through fraud, Justice Nagesh Bhimapaka of the Telangana high court on Tuesday dismissed the petition filed by him and imposed costs of 1 crore with a direction to pay the amount within three weeks to the High Court Legal Services Authority.
The judge gave the direction while dismissing the petition filed by Venkata Rami Reddy of Sangeet Nagar in Nampally, who wants the high court to restrain the road and buildings (R&B) department officials from interfering in his 9 acres, 11 guntas of land and also to direct the registration department to allow him to sell the land situated in survey numbers 310/1 and 310/2.
It was only after govt pleader (GP) for the revenue department, K Muralidhar Reddy, placed details of nearly a dozen cases filed by the petitioner in different courts with different orders, some of them conflicting with each other, and unveiled the ‘total picture’ of the fraud being played by the petitioner, the judge realised the gravity of the situation and decided to pass an order that would teach a lesson to Venkata Rami Reddy on one hand and would serve as a deterrent for future litigants on the other.
The petitioner claimed that his father Pattabhiram Reddy had bought the land on July 30, 1980, from the legal heirs of one R Venkatesham. However, the fact, according to state counsel Muralidhar Reddy, R Venkatesham was not the owner of the land parcel. “This is a state land which was recorded in the revenue records as G Abadi land. The legal heirs of Venkatesham themselves had lost title suits before civil courts and also before the high court. Their second appeal is still pending before the high court. What is more perplexing is that even the alleged original owners, from whom Pattabhiram bought the land, have also complained against Venkatrami Reddy saying that he was trying to grab the land under various pretexts,” the GP said.
The modus operandi he applied before the high court was multifarious and nefarious. He resorted to forum shopping by choosing to get his case listed before a judge whom he considered liberal. For that, he chose the subjects route. Every six months, the subjects of the judges keep changing according to the roster allotted to them by the chief justice. If he finds that a particular judge, looking after revenue subject, is proving to be tough, he would file another petition, this time, making municipal officials as respondents charging them with interfering in his land.
The current petition surfaced before Justice Nagesh because he made R&B officials respondents. The judge went through the whole record and was shocked to see the lengths to which the petitioner was going to confuse the courts. In the current case, the court was not aware of the previous litigation till the revenue counsel brought to the fore various status quo, stay and injunction orders he obtained from high court and civil courts. Most of them were either dismissed or withdrawn. All these details were suppressed before the court.
By last week, Justice Nagesh got a grasp of the case and directed the registry not to allow the petitioner to withdraw the case and on Tuesday dismissed the case with exemplary costs of 1 crore.
