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We find it quite difficult to understand how the High Court could hold that the District Court had not recorded any "clear finding" that the entries in the revenue record for the year 1356 Fasli were fraudulent. Evidently, the attention of the High Court was not drawn to at least half a dozen reasons given by the District Court for holding that the entries were "fictitious" and were made "surreptitiously" and "fraudulently".

We could have even appreciated if, under section 103 of the Code of Civil Procedure, the High Court were to determine the issue whether the entries were fraudulent, if it though, wrongly though, that the District Court had not recorded a clear finding on that issue. But the High Court did not discuss the evidence at all and chose instead to place a blind and easy reliance on the entries which are utterly uninspiring. B It is true that the entries in the revenue record ought, generally, to be accepted at their face value and courts should not embark upon an appellate inquiry in to their correctness. But the presumption of correctness can apply only to genuine, not forged or fraudulent, entries. The distinction may be fine but it is real. The distinction is that one cannot challenge the correctness of what the entry is the revenue record states but the entry is open to the attack that it was Made fraudulently or surreptitiously. Fraud and forgery rob a document of all its legal effect and cannot found a claim to possessory title.