1963 BLR ( C C ) 708

ဆရာကြီးဦးမြသင်ကြားပို့ချချက်များ

PJLB 484

1948 BLR ( H C ) 411 ( D B )

1958 BLR 22(25)

1961 BLR ( H C ) 298 စီရင်ထုံးများက-

တရားလိုသည်”ပိုင်ရှင်အသွင်ဆောင်သူဖြစ်ရမည်ဟုမဆိုပါ။”

တရားလိုသည်တရားမစွဲဆိုမီ၁၂နှစ်အတွင်းအချင်းဖြစ်ဥပစာကိုဥပဒေနှင့်အညီ”လက်ရှိထားခဲ့သူ”ဖြစ်ရန်သာလိုသည်။

8 LBR 227 ( F B )အမှုတွင်ပြဆိုသော၊ယခင့်ယခင်ကလက်ရှိထားခဲ့ခြင်းသက်သက်(mere previous possession)ဟူသောပြဆိုချက်နှင့်မယိုးမစွဲဖြစ်သည်။

အနှစ်သာရအားဖြင့်တူသည်ကိုအတိုင်းသားမြင်နိုင်သည်။

———————————

1963 BLR ( C C ) 708 

MAUNG MYA THAN AND ANOTHER (APPELLANTS)

                        V.

U TUN TIN (RESPONDENT).*

Before U San Maung, J.

အမှုတွင်၊တရားဝန်ကြီးဦးစံမောင်က၊လက်ရှိထားပိုင်ခွင့်အရလက်ရောက်ရလိုမှုစွဲဆိုနိုင်သည်ဟုပြဆိုရာ၌၊”လက်ရှိထားသည့်ကာလသည်၁၂နှစ်ပြည့်ရန်မလို”ဟုဆုံးဖြတ်လိုက်ရာ၊မြန်မာနိုင်ငံစီရင်ထုံးသမိုင်းတွင်ပထမဆုံးစီရင်ထုံးဖြစ်လာသည်။

တရားဝန်ကြီးဦးစံမောင်ကအိန္ဒိယနိုင်ငံစီရင်ထုံး၊မြန်မာနိုင်ငံစီရင်ထုံးများကိုရည်ညွှန်းကိုးကား၍အောက်ပါအတိုင်းဆုံးဖြတ်သည်-

“Held: The Plaintiff had been in possession either by himself or through his licensce, his half-sister, till about 4 years before the date of suit.

Accordingly, the conclusion arrived at by the lower Appellate Court is correct.

Ismail Ariff v. Mahomed Ghous, I.L.R. 20 Cal. 834 (P.C.); Maung Naw v.Ma Shwe Hmut and one, 8 L.B.R. 227 (FB); Nisa Chand Gaita and others v .Kanchiram Bagani, I.L.R. 26 Cal. 570; Nga Tha Zan v. Sunder Singh,III.U.B.R. 125; Narayana Row v. Dharmachar, I. L.R. 26 Mad., p.514,referred to.

It can be taken as settled law that it is not necessary in order to maintain a suit for ejectment based on a possessory title that the plaintiff should have been in possession of the suit land for the statutory period of 12 years or more.

In the case now under consideration if the plaintiff's story is true, he had been in possession for more than 12 years.

Assuming that he was in possession for ho more than 10 or 11 years by himself, and through his licensee, his half-sister, he would still have the right to eject the defendants.

Ma Saw v. Maung Shwe Gan and one, XI L.B.R. 415; Ma Pwa Zon and two V. Ma Pan I and one, I.L.R. V Ran. 154, referred to.”

စီရင်ထုံးစာမျက်နှာ၇၁၁နှင့်၇၁၂တွင်၊လက်ထောက်ခရိုင်တရားရုံး၏သုံးသပ်ဆုံးဖြတ်ချက်မှန်ကန်ကြောင်း၊တရားဝန်ကြီးဦးစံမောင်ကအောက်ပါအတိုင်းသုံးသပ်သည်-

“According to U Tun Tin, after the death of Daw Tar and before his marriage to Daw Hla Bone, U Po Tauk gave his son U Tha U and his daughter Daw Ein May their share of inheritance so that they had no claim whatsoever to the suit land.

This fact was not specifically denied by Ko Ba Myaing (DW I) who only said that he had no knowledge of it.

However, as held by both the Courts below U Tun Tin had been in possession either by himself or through his licensee Ma Phwa of the suit land till about four years before the date of the suit, when Ma Phwa's own daughter Ma Saw Tin and her husband Maung Mya Than squatted on the suit land and built a house thereon without obtain ing any permission either from U Tun Tin or Ma Phwa.

In these circumstances the learned Judge of the Additional District Court held that possessory title in U Tun Tin having been established he could maintain a suit for ejectment against the defendants Ma Saw Tin and Maung Mya Than.

In my opinion, the conclusion arrived at by him is correct.”

စီရင်ထုံးစာမျက်နှာ၇၁၂နှင့်၇၁၃တွင်အိန္ဒိယနိုင်ငံစီရင်ထုံးနှင့်မြန်မာနိုင်ငံစီရင်ထုံးများအပါအဝင်၊စီရင်ထုံး(၇)ရပ်ကိုရည်ညွှန်းကိုးကား၍တရားဝန်ကြီးဦးစံမောင်ကအောက်ပါအတိုင်းသုံးသပ်ဆုံးဖြတ်သည်-

“Now, in Ismail Ariff v. Mahomed Ghous (I) I.L.R. 20 Cal. 834 (PC).the Privy Council held that lawful possession of land is sufficient evidence of right as owner, as against a person who has no title whatever, and who is a mere trespasser, and that the former can obtain a declaratory decree against the latter as to his right and an injunction restraining him from interfering with his possession.

Relying upon this dictum a Full Bench of the late Chief Court of Lower Burma held In re Maung Naw v. Ma Shwe Hmut and one (2) 8 L.B.R. 227 (FB).that mere previous possession is sufficient to support a claim for possession against one who has dispossessed the plaintiff when the defendant has no title himself. 

However, a Bench of the Calcutta High Court distinguishing the case of Ismail Ariff v. Mahomed Ghous (1). I.L.R. 20 Cal. 834 (PC).held in Nisa Ghand Gaita and others v. Kanchiram Bagani (3) I.L. R. 26 Cal. 579;that mere previous possession for any period short of the statutory period of 12 vears will not entitle a plaintiff to a decree for recovery of possession in a suit brought more than six months after dispossession, even if the defendant could not establish any title to the disputed land.

This decision of the Calcutta High Court was followed by the Judicial Commissioner of Upper Burma in Nga Tha Zan v. Sunder Singh (4). III U.B.R. 125.

The decision of the Calcutta High Court above cited was dissented from by the Madras High Court in Narayana Row v. Dharmachar (5). I.L.R. 26 Mad., p. 514.

There it was held that possession is under the Indian, as under the English law, good title against all but the true owner and that prior possession of the plaintiff is sufficient title in an action of ejectment even if the suit be brought more than six months after the act of dispossession complained of, and that the wrongdoer cannot successfully resist the suit by showing that the title and right to possession are in a third person.

The Madras decision was followed by the Chief Court of Lower Burma in Ma Saw v. Maung Shwe Gan and one (6) XI. L.B.R. 415. and by the late High Court of Judicature at Rangoon in Ma Pwa Zon and two v. Ma Pan I and one (7). I.L.R. V Ran. 154.

Ma Pwa Zon's case specifically dissented from Nga Tha Zan v. Sunder Singh (4). III U.B.R. 125.

Therefore, it can be taken as settled law, that it is not necessary in order to maintain a suit for ejectment based on a possessory title that the plaintiff should have been in possession of the suit land for the statutory period of 12 years or more. 

In the case now under consideration if the plaintiff's story as supported by Ma Phwa (PW 3) and other witnesses, that he became possessed of the suit land since about 18 years before the date of the suit till he was dispossessed by the defendants about four years before the date of the suit, be accepted, he had been in possession for more than the statutory period of 12 years.

Assuming that he was in possession for no more than 1o or Ir years by himself and through his licensee Ma Phwa he would, following the decision in Ma Pwa Zon and two v. Ma Pan I and one (7), I.L.R. V Ran. 154. still have the right to eject the defendants.

In the result the appeal fails and it is dismissed with costs,Advocate's fees being assessed at 3 (three) gold.”