Indian Kanoon - Search engine for Indian Law

CIVIL APPELLATE JURISDICTION: Civil Appeal No. 328 of 1962. Appeal by special leave from the judgment and order dated September 4, 1961, of the Allahabad High Court in Civil Misc. writ No. 3469 of 1960.

K. L. Misra, Advocate-General for the State of U. P., C. B. Agarwala, K. S. Hajela and C. P. Lal, for the appellants.

S. P. Sinha and M. 1. Khowaja, for respondent No. 1. 1962. August 27. The Judgement of the Court was delivered by GAJENDRAGADKAR, J.-This appeal by special leave arises out of a Writ Petition filed by the respondent Bagleshwar Prasad against the Board of High School and Intermediate Education, U. P., Allahabad, and its Secretary, appellants 1 & 2, and another. By his petition, the respondent challenged the validity of the order passed by appellant No. 1 on December 5, 1960, cancelling the respondent's result at the High School Examination held in 1960. It appears that the respondent appeared for the said examination from the Nehru Intermediate College Centre, Bindki. He was declared to have passed the said examination in the 11 Division with distinction in Art. Thereafter, he joined Intermediate first year class in the Kulbaskar Ashram Agriculture College at Allahabad. On the 3rd September, 1960, he received a letter from the Principal, Adarsh Higher Secondary School, Kora Jahanabad, from where he had appeared for the High School examination, calling upon him to appear before a Sub- Committee to answer the charge of having used unfair means in English, Mathematics and Hindi papers. Accordingly, he appeared before the said Sub-Committee. A charge was given to him and his explanation was obtained on the said charge. This charge was based on the fact that in Hindi 3rd paper set at the said examination, the respondent had given wrong answers to Question No. 4 in precisely the same firm in which the said answers had been given by a candidate whose Roll No. was 91733. The respondont's Roll No. was 91731. The respondent was shown the identical wrong answers to the said Question which were found in the two papers, and he was asked to explaining about the said identity of the wrong answers. He admitted that the wrong answers appeared to be identical, but he denied that he had used any unfair means. The Sub-Committee however, was not satisfied with the explanation and reported that both the respondent and the candidate whose Roll No. was 94733 had used unfair means. As a result of the report made by the Sub-Committee, the first appellant passed an order cancelling the results of both the candidates. Both the said candidates disputed the validity of the said order, in the Allahabad High Court. The petition filed by the candidate whose Roll No. was 94733 was dismissed, but that of the respondent was allowed, and the impugned order passed by appellant No-1 cancelling, the result of the respondent in the High School examination for 1960, has been set aside. It is against this order that the appellants have come to this Court by special leave. From the petition field by the the High Court (W. P. No. 3469 of 1960) it appears that he challenged the validity of the impugned order on several grounds. The principal contentions raised by the petitioner against the competence and the authority of appellant No.1 and against the regularity and fairness of the enquiry held, srose for decision- before the High Court in the companion W. P. No. 3196 of 1960 also. The High Court rejected the said contentions of law in that W. P. and for the reasons recorded in the judgment in that petition, the said contentions were rejected even in the present petition. Thus, the challenge to the validity of the order made on points of law was not sustained. The High Court then proceeded to examine the narrow ground of attack against the validity of the order which was made on the basis that the impugned order was not supported by any evidence at all. It appears from the judgment of the High Court that the High court was inclined to accept this argument and it has set aside the order on the ground that it is not supported by any evidence. The correctness of this finding is seriously disputed before us by the learned Advocate-General who appears for the appellants. It is common ground that the proceed in taken against the respondent in respect of the unfair means alleged to have been adopted by him at the examination, are in the nature of quasi-judicial proceedings, and as such, in a proper case, orders passed as a result of the said proceedings would be liable to be challenged under Art.226 of the Constitution. It is also common ground that the High Court would be justified in quashing the impugned order if it is satisfied that the said order is not based on any evidence at all. An order passed by a Tribunal holding a quasi-judicial enquiry which is not supported by any evidence, is an order which is erroneous on the face of it and as such, is liable to be quashed by the High Court in exercise of its high prerogative jurisdiction to issue a writ under Art. 226. In the present case, the High Court has found that the conclusion of the enquiry Committee that the respondent had copied either from the answer book of the candidate bearing Roll No-947 3 or from a common source, was not supported by any evidence In coming to this conclusion, the High Court has assumed that the charge against the respondent was that he had copied from the candidate bearing Roll No. 94733. Having made this assumption, the High Court has observed that there was no charge against the respondent that he connived in the act of copying by the other candidate ,from his answer-book, and it has added that there is no evidence in proof of such connivance. The High Court has also stated that no evidence had been shown to justify the allegations that any outsider had helped the candidate, including the respondent. That, in brief, is the genesis of the final conclusion of the High Court.

It appears that the High Court was in error in assuming that the only charge against the respondent was that he had copied from the paper of the candidate bearing Roll No. 94733 and this error is basically responsible for the other observations made by the High Court. The translation of the charge as it has been printed in the record before us, no doubt, seems to support the assumption made by the High Court in regard to the nature of the charge' But the charge was framed in Hindi and it is common ground before us that the Hindi charge has not been properly translated from the record when it seems to show that what was alleged against the respondent was only that he had copied out from candidate bearing Roll No. 94733. The charge, in terms, was that having regard to the identity of the mistaken answers, the apprehension was that there had been copying, and that is very different from saying that the only charge was that the respondent had copied from the other candidate. This position is made very clear when we consider the explanation given by the respondent. In his explanation, the respondent bad stated that he had not copied out from the answer-, book of any candidate, nor had he allowed anyone to copy out from his answer-book, so far as he could. He admitted that the mistaken answers in the two papers were identical and he pleaded 'that he could not say any thing as to why this happened. He was also asked whether he had got any help from outside and he gave an answer in the negative. It would thus be seen that at the enquiry, the charge against the respondent was, either that he copied from candidate bearing Roll No. 94733, or that he connived at the said candidate copying from his answer-book, or that both of them had copied from a common source. In either case, 'it would amount to the adoption, of unfair means. Therefore, in our opinion, the High Court was in error in assuming that the charge was very narrow and did not include the two other alternatives on which the adoption of unfair means was sought to be established.

The report of the enquiry committee also shows that the complaints which they were to investigate referred to copying on a large scale in several papers besides Hindi, and it is after examining all the complaints in the light of the evidence available to them that the Committee made its final report; and in that report, it held that the respondent and candidate bearing Roll No. 94733 were guilty of having used unfair means.

In dealing with the question as to whether the Committee was justified in coming to this conclusion against the respondent, it would not be reasonable to exclude from consideration the circumstances under which the whole enquiry came to be hold and the general background of the prevailing disturbed and riotous atmosphere in the Examination Hall during the days that the High School Examination was held at the Centre in 1960. Unfortunately, the High Court has ignored this background altogether. Before the High Court, a statement was filed showing the seating arrangement in Room No. 10 where the respondent was sitting for writing his answers. It appears that he was No. 3 in the 3rd row, whereas the other candidate with Roll No. 94733 was No. 4 in the second row. The High Court was very much impressed by the fact that the respondent could not have looked back and copied from the answer. book of the other candidate, and the High Court did not think that there was any evidence to show that the other candidate could have copied from the respondents paper with his connivance. We have looked at the incorrect answers ourselves and we are not prepared to hold that the identical incorrect answers were given by the two candidates either by accident or by coincidence. Some of the incorrect answers, and, particularly, the manner in which they have been given, clearly suggest that they were the result of either one candidate copying from the other, or both candidates copying from a common source. The significance of this fact has been completely missed by the High Court. The question before the Enquiry Committee had to be decided by it in the light of the nature of the incorrect answers themselves, and that is what the Enquiry Committee has done. It would, we think be inappropriate in such a case to require direct evidence to show that the respondent could have looked back and copied from the answer written by the other candidate who was sitting behind him. There was still the alternative possibility that the candidate sitting behind may have copied from the respondent with his connivance. It is also not unlikely that the two candidates may have talked to each other. The atmosphere prevailing in the Examination Hall does not rule out this possibility. These are all matters which the Enquiry Committee had to consider, and the fact. that the Enquiry Committee did not write an elaborate report, does not mean that it did not consider all the relevant facts before it came to the conclusion that the respondent had used unfair' means.