6 Ran ( P C ) 142 စီရင်ထုံးပါအဆုံးအဖြတ်ကိစ္စ။[Part Ten]

 ဆရာကြီးဦးမြသင်ကြားပို့ချချက်များ

6 Ran ( P C ) 142 

BHOGILAL BHIKACHAND AND OTHERS (Plaintiffs)

                      V.

ROYAL INSURANCE CO., LTD. (Defendants).

PRESENT: VISCOUNT HALDANE,LORD ATKINSON,LORD BLANESBURGH,LORD DARLING and LORD WARRINGTON OF CLYFFE.

စီရင်ထုံးပါအဆုံးအဖြတ်ကိစ္စ။[ Part Ten ]

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6 Ran ( P C ) 142 

BHOGILAL BHIKACHAND AND OTHERS (Plaintiffs)

                      V.

ROYAL INSURANCE CO., LTD. (Defendants).

PRESENT: VISCOUNT HALDANE,LORD ATKINSON,LORD BLANESBURGH,LORD DARLING and LORD WARRINGTON OF CLYFFE.

(On Appeal from the High Court at Rangoon.)

Appeal No. 103 of 1926 from a decree of the High Court in its Appellate Jurisdiction (June 15.1925) reversing a decree of the Court in its Original Jurisdiction (June 24.1924).

At the conclusion of the arguments their Lordships intimated that the appeal would be allowed, and that the reasons would be delivered later.

December 16. The judgment of their Lordships was delivered by LORD BLANESBURGH.

J.C.* 1927 ,Dec. 16.

တရားလိုပြသက်သေ Mehta သည်၊ယုံကြည်ထိုက်သူမဟုတ်ကြောင်းတရားပြိုင်ဘက်မှသက်သေခံအက်ဥပဒေပုဒ်မ၁၅၃နှင့်၁၅၅(၃)အရတင်ပြသည့်ပြဿနာကို၊စီရင်ထုံးစာမျက်နှာ၁၆၄မှစ၍စိစစ်ပြသည်။

ထိုသက်သေကမိမိအားငွေကျပ်ငါးသောင်းပေးလျှင်၊တရားပြိုင်ဘက်ကိုလိုက်၍သက်သေခံမည်ဟု၊တရားပြိုင်၏ဝန်ထမ်းများကိုကမ်းလှမ်းခဲ့ကြောင်း၊မူလတရားရုံးနှင့်အယူခံခုံရုံးတို့ကောက်ယူပြီး၊၎င်း၏ထွက်ဆိုချက်ကိုပယ်ချခဲ့ကြောင်း၊စီရင်ထုံးစာမျက်နှာ၁၆၄၏အစ၌၊အောက်ပါအတိုင်းကနဦးဖော်ပြသည်-

[The first is the rejection from consideration by both Courts of the evidence given in the suit by Mehta.

Mehta, in the box, had confirmed generally the evidence given by the second and third appellants and by Pandya as to the purchase and making up and despatch of the diamonds.

By the Trial Judge the evidence of these witnesses was, on these matters, accepted in its entirety; by the Appellate Court it was accepted except as to the evidence of posting given by the second appellant. 

Mehta's evidence, however, was rejected altogether, and that because of the finding of both Courts that he had offered the respondents' representatives in Burma to give evidence in their favour if he was paid by them the sum of Rs. 50,000.]

လာဘ်တောင်းသည်ဆိုခြင်းကို Mehta ကငြင်းဆိုကြောင်း၊စီရင်ထုံးစာမျက်နှာ၁၆၄၊၁၆၅တွင်အောက်ပါအတိုင်းဖော်ပြသည်-

[ It all arose in this way.

One Bhattacharjee,an officer who had taken some part in the police investigation into the loss of the jewels, remained, while still attached to the police, actively interested in the preparation of the respondents' case.

He sat by their counsel at the trial instructing him.

Witnesses called by them--more especially the two chief witnesses in support of the case of fraudulent conspiracy, had been brought forward as a result of his activities.

To the police, Mehta at an early stage had made his statement: that statement was in the possession of the respondents.

It may be assumed that it was in accord with the evidence he gave at the trial, because he was in no way confronted with it as being in any way in conflict with his evidence as then given.

After having made that statement, Mehta, it seems, suffered a robbery at his own house, and so again came into association with Bhattacharjee, who, it would appear, obtained a promise from Mehta that, notwithstanding his previous statement, he would for Rs. 50,000 make a full confession and a statement before a magistrate to the effect that the respondents' charge of fraud was true.

Bhattacharjee, delighted with his success, although doubtful whether Mehta was not something of a humorist out to play a trick upon him, expressed to his chief at Rangoon his fear that the respondents would. not be prepared to pay so large a sum as Rs. 50,000 on so doubtful a chance.

He arranged, however, to bring Mehta to Rangoon in secret, unknown particularly to the second and third appellants, and there to put him in direct contact with the respondents' representatives.

He first took him to their legal adviser. 

To that gentleman Mehta apparently repeated his proposal. 

But unsuccesfully.

He rightly felt that such a suggestion was one which professionally he could not entertain, and Mehta was handed over to the respondents' manager at Rangoon.

To him he made the same statement, and apparently-for that is the effect of the manager's evidence- his offer was rejected, not because it would have been discreditable or dishonourable to enter into any such corrupt bargain, but really because there was no certainty as to what the purchased evidence would be, while the price asked for it was exorbitant. Had Mehta been willing to accept the reward of Rs. 10,000 previously offered by the respondents for information as to the diamonds, the bargain, so the witness leaves it to be inferred, would have been struck.

To Mehta, when he was called, these matters were put in cross-examination.

He denied them all. 

It was put to him also that in connection with the preliminary police inquiry he had attempted to bribe the butler of the District Magistrate. 

It was suggested to him further that, in conversation with one Lalu Misser, he had stated that the whole case of the appellants was a swindle.

When the case for the respondents was reached, they sought to contradict all these denials of Mehta by substantive evidence, adduced under section 155 (3) of the Evidence Act.

The learned Judge permitted them so to do by calling Bhattacharjee, the respondents' manager at Rangoon, the District Magistrate's butler and Lalu Misser.]

စိန်ရတနာများပျောက်ဆုံးသည့်ကိစ္စကိုစုံစမ်းသော Bhattacharjee ၏စီစဉ်ပေးချက်အရ၊လာဘ်ကိစ္စနှင့်စပ်လျဉ်း၍ Mehta နှင့်တွေ့ဆုံသောတရားပြိုင်အာမခံကုမ္ပဏီ၏ရန်ကုန်ရုံးခွဲမန်နေဂျာ၊စိန်ပျောက်မှုကိုရန်ကုန်ခရိုင်ရာဇဝတ်တရားသူကြီးကရဲအားစုံစမ်းစေဆဲ၌၊ Mehta ကလာဘ်ပေးရန်စကားပြောခဲ့ဖူးသည်ဆိုသောတရားသူကြီး၏ဘဏ္ဍာစိုးနှင့်စကားစမြီပြောရာ၌၊တရားလိုများ၏အမှုမှာအလိမ်ကြီးပါဟု Mehta ကပြောခဲ့ဖူးသည်ဆိုသော Lalu Misser တို့ကို၊သက်သေခံအက်ဥပဒေပုဒ်မ၁၅၅(၃)ပါအောက်ပါပြဌာန်းချက်များအရသက်သေထူသည်-

[ by proof of former statements inconsistent with any part of this evidence which is liable to be contradicted. ]

Lalu Misser က Mehta သည်၊မိမိအားစွပ်စွဲသကဲ့သို့မပြောဖူးပါဟုငြင်းသဖြင့်၊တရားပြိုင်ဘက်မှသက်သေခံအက်ဥပဒေပုဒ်မ၁၅၃(၃)အရကြိုးပမ်းမှုမအောင်မြင်။

ပရီဗီကောင်စီကစီရင်ထုံးစာမျက်နှာ၁၆၆တွင်၊ Bhattacharjee နှင့်အာမခံကုမ္ပဏီ၏မန်နေဂျာတို့၏ထွက်ဆိုချက်ကို၊သက်သေခံအက်ဥပဒေပုဒ်မ၁၅၅(၃)အရလက်ခံခြင်းသည်၊သက်သေခံအက်ဥပဒေပုဒ်မ၁၅၅(၃)နှင့်မညီဟုမဆို။

သို့သော်ဘဏ္ဍာစိုးနှင့် Lalu Misser တို့၏ထွက်ဆိုချက်များကိုလက်ခံခြင်းသည်သက်သေခံအက်ဥပဒေပုဒ်မ၁၅၅(၃)နှင့်မညီဟုသုံးသပ်ပြသည်။

[ The last denied that Mehta had ever made any such statement to him; the others supported the stories which Mehta had denied.

The learned Judge found that in these last denials Mehta had lied, and he accordingly refused to consider his evidence at all.

Upon this two questions arise for discussion.

The first is whether the evidence in rebuttal was properly admitted.

Their Lordships are not prepared to hold that the evidence of Bhattacharjee and the respondents' manager on this issue was not properly received, but they think the section was stretched beyond its true purport in admitting the evidence of the butler and Lalu Misser.

Sections 153 and 155 of the Indian Evidence Act must, in their Lordships' judgment, be strictly construed and narrowly interpreted if the Courts governed by that statute are to be spared the task in many suits of prosecuting, on most imperfect material, issues which have no bearing upon that really in contest between the parties.

Section 153 does not go far beyond, if it goes at all beyond, the case of Attornery-General v. Hitchcock (1) (1847) 1. Exch. 91. on which doubtless it was based. ]

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