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Showing contexts for: Forgery of document in Mohamed Oomer, Mohamed Noorullah vs S.M. Noorudin on 13 August, 1951Matching Fragments
[2] Now with regard to this application for adjournment we find that, in the grounds of appeal before the learned Judge below, it is now-where mentioned that the application for adjournment was made in order to enable she respondent to establish that the document under consideration was a forgery. As a matter of fact, the grounds refer only to one application for adjournment, which was to enable the respondent to produce his books of account from Trichinopoly to prove continuous user of the said mark since 1923. We have been told at the bar that an application for adjournment was made to the Registrar in order to enable the respondent to lead evidence as to the genuineness of the punchnama. But there is no record of any such application in the notes of the Registrar. It is unnecessary to consider this question further, because, in our opinion, the learned Registrar did allow certain evidence to be led with regard to the proof of the document. The grievance of the respondent now is that he was not allowed to lead all the evidence and there is some more evidence available which he wants to adduce before the Registrar. The learned Judge, with respect to him, is not also wholly justified in the view that he took that the Registrar came to the conclusion that the panchnama was proved because no objection to the document was taken by the respondent in his affidavit. The learned Judge seems to have been under the impression that the Registrar merely went on the pleadings and raised a presumption against the respondent and came to the conclusion that the document was proved because the respondent had failed to take any objection to the document when it was disclosed in the affidavit of the appellant. This is not wholly borne out by the judgment of the Registrar, because, although the Registrar does say "I do not think it would be fair to the opponent if I were to allow the applicant at the hearing to deny having signed the panchnama, as the issue was not raised in any part of his defence", still he does go on, in fact, to consider the evidence which was actually led as to the signing of this document There, fore, although this particular fact might have weighed with the Registrar, it was not the only fact on which his judgment was based. But, as I said before, the position is that the respondent has further evidence to lead which he has not led before the Registrar; and we do not think, taking everything into consideration, that it would be proper for as, sitting in appeal, to interfere with the order of remand made by the learned Judge, as in doing so he has exercised his discretion.
But apart from this discrepancy, the affidavit of the opponent does set out the terms of the document and its effect, and it is undoubtedly significant that the applicant did not in any way deal with that document. He challenged the document for the first time when the matter came before the Registrar and then the Registrar decided that evidence should be led. All the evidence with regard to this document in the first instance should have been by affidavit and if the case of the applicant was that he had never put his signature to any such document and that, if his signature had appeared on any such document, it was a forgery, he should have set out that case in his affidavit in support of his application. Therefore, we cannot say that the Registrar was entirely in error when he attached considerable importance to the fact that the applicant did not denied his signature in the affidavit which had been filed before the hearing took place before the Registrar. But the learned Judge is right when he says that, when the document was of such great importance, the applicant should not have been denied the opportunity of leading all the evidence he wanted to in order to establish that the document was a forgery. It would be taking too technical a view of the rules to have tied the application down to his admission in the affidavits that the document was not a forgery or that the document was a genuine one and that too not an express admission but merely a constructive admission inasmuch as he had not expressly denied the genuineness of any such document.