' Z. A. CHANNA , J.-These two Letters Patent Appeals one by an allottee of land and the other by the Deputy Settlement Commissioner (Land), call in question the judgment given by a learned Single Judge of this Court on 15-6-1971, in Constitutional Petition No, 456/1965, allowing the said petition and setting aside the order passed on 6-5-1965 by Mr. Muhammad Hassan, Deputy Settlement Commissioner, delegated with the powers of Chief Settlement Commissioner, West Pakistan, Lahore. By this order the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner, purporting to act under sections 10 and 11 of the Displaced Persons (Land Settlement) Act, 1958, hereinafter referred to as the said Act, ordered that the allotment of lands confirmed in the names of the respondents in L. P.
A. No, 149/71 in Sanghar District be cancelled forthwith and the said area be made available for allotment to genuine claimants. This order was passed by the Learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner on a reference received by him from the Chief Settlement Commissioner, forwarding to him the cases relating to the allotment of land in Sanghar District to the said respondents with the direction to take action under section 11 of the said Act, according to law.
2. The facts which form the background of these two appeals, shortly stated are, that Iqbal Ahmad, the respondent in L.P.A. No, 149/71, his family members and the members of his deceased brother, Abdul Hafeez Khan, hereinafter for the sake of brevity collectively referred to as the respondents, migrated on Partition from village Guriani, Tehsil Jhajjar, District Rohtak, East Punjab and provisionally were allotted some lands in village Jaboka, Tehsil Okara, District Montgomery, in the year 1952. However, they were not interested in allotment of land in West Punjab as they had since 1948 settled at Shahpur Chakar, District Sanghar, where appellant Abdul Ghaffar had also settled.
According to the respondents, immediately after the Government of Sind had adopted the policy previously followed by the Government of West Punjab, permitting refugees settled in one Unit or Province but holding allotments of lands in another Unit or Province to have their claims transferred to the Unit or Province where they were settled, after obtaining approval of the Rehabilitation Commissioner, they applied through the Additional Mukhtiarkar at Shandadpur for transfer of their claims from Montgomery to Sind. It is their case that after considerable efforts and correspondence the Member Board of Revenue, West Pakistan, who was also the Rehabilitation Commissioner, West Pakistan, by his letter dated 11-3-1957, acceded to the request of the respondents for transfer of their claims from Montgomery to Sanghar, and in pursuance of the said Order, their allotments in Montgomery were cancelled and they were allotted 23 acres and 9 ghuntas of agricultural land in Deh Shahpur Chakar and 24 acres and 2 ghuntas in Deh Chamrao.
The transfer of these lands to the respondents was challenged by the father of appellant Abdul Ghaffar, to whom they had been provisionally transferred previously, in Writ Petition No, 368/68, but the said Writ Petition was dismissed as having become infructuous on account of an application for amendment of petition by the father of appellant Abdul Ghaffar being rejected by the Court.
Undeterred by the rejection of this Writ Petition, appellant Abdul Ghaffar made representations to the Rehabilitation Authorities for cancellation of the allotments in favour of the respondents. It appears that no action was taken on three such representations, but on his fourth representation, the Chief Settlement Commissioner referred the question of allotment of lands to the respondents in Sanghar District to his delegatee, Mr. Muhammad Hassan, Deputy Settlement Commissioner, who, after issuing notices to the concerned parties and recording evidence, held that the alleged order of the Rehabilitation Commissioner, West Pakistan, dated 11th March, 1957, was a forged document and that respondent Iqbal Khan, acting as special attorney of the other respondents, had obtained allotment of 19 acres, 13 ghuntas in the name of his brother, Abdul Hafeez Khan, on the basis of the latter's claims, in respect of which full compensation had already been received by his heirs in other areas in Montgomery District. In these circumstances, he ordered, in exercise of the powers of Chief Settlement Commissioner under sections 10 and 11 of the said Act, that the allotment confirmed in the names of respondents in Sanghar District be cancelled forthwith and that their claim forms be forwarded to the Deputy Settlement Commissioner, Montgomery. In those proceedings, a report dated 9th January, 1957, from the Patwari of Jaboka was produced to the effect that respondent lqbal Ahmad had contacted him and requested him to hand over his claim forms to him, but he (the Patwari) had refused on the ground that he himself would forward the claim forms after getting the area, which had been confirmed in the names of the respondents, de-confirmed, but on the next day he found these claims missing from his Bastas and he was confident that the claims had been stolen by Iqbal Ahmad.
3. The respondents, being aggrieved by the aforesaid order of the Deputy Settlement Commissioner, filed Constitutional Petition No, 456/65, to challenge its validity. This petition was allowed by a learned Single Judge of this Court by his judgment delivered on 15th June 1971. Against this judgment, 2 separate appeals have been filed, one by Abdul Ghaffar son of Ghulam Mohiuddin, who had migrated from India alongwith respondents in Sanghar District, and the second by the Deputy Settlement Commissioner (Lands).
4. In coming to the finding that the alleged letter of the Rehabilitation Commissioner, dated 11th March, 1957, regarding the transfer of the respondents claims from Montgomery to Sanghar, was a forgery, the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner relied on two circumstances, namely, that the respondents had failed to produce the copy of the said letter which was alleged to have been forwarded to them, and that further no copy of the said letter or papers in connection therewith were traceable in the office of the Chief Settlement Commissioner. The learned Single Judge, in holding a contrary view, took into consideration three pieces of evidence, the first of these was a certificate from the Deputy Settlement Commissioner and Additional Settlement Commissioner
(Land) Sanghar, dated 9th August, 1965. To the effect that a copy of the letter of the Rehabilitation Commissioner in question had in a fact been received in Sanghar and was entered at serial No, 636 of the Deputy Settlement Commissioner's register on 19th March 1967. The second piece of evidence on which the relied upon was an affidavit, dated 16th April 1971 of Rana Muhammad Arshad Khan, Advocate, Montgomery, who had stated that he had examined the file of transfer of claim forms of respondents from Okara to Sanghar, and he had found in file No, 2 the letter from the Board of Revenne/Rehabilitation Commissioner, regarding transfer of the respondents claim to Sanghar. The last piece of evidence which the learned Judge took into consideration in this behalf was that the respondents had from 1952 been making applications to the Rehabilitation Authorities for the transfer of their claims to Sanghar.
5. Mr. Khalid Ishaque, the learned counsel for the appellants in L. P. A. 135/71, assailed the judgment of the learned Single Judge on the grounds :-
(1) that in the exercise of writ jurisdiction, it was not permissible for the learned Judge to reappraise the evidence which had been recorded and considered by the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner ;
(ii) that the learned Single Judge wrongly considered transfer of land to respondents under old para. 13-A of the Rehabilitation Settlement Scheme, when the new para. 13-A came into force on 19th January, 1957, that is before the alleged transfer of the respondents claims to Sanghar.
(iii) that so far as the record shows, there is no application from the respondents made to the Rehabilitation Commissioner for transfer of their claim to Sanghar District ; and
(iv) that the learned Single Judge erroneously held that appellant Abdul Ghaffar had no locus standi in the matter, ignoring the fact that the land which had been allotted to the respondents had been provisionally allotted to the said appellant, and further he was made a respondent in the writ petition out of which these appeals have arisen and was also a party in the proceedings before Choudhry Muhammad Hassan.
6. Mr. Saeed A. Shaikh, the learned counsel for the appellant in L. P. A. No, 149/71, adopted the arguments of Mr. Khalid Ishaque. Additionally, he took objection to the production by the respondent's counsel before us of the copy of the alleged order of the Rehabilitation Commissioner, dated 11th March, 1957, said to have been received by the respondents, as also the consideration by the learned Single Judge of the certificate of the Deputy Commissioner and Additional Settlement Commissioner (Land), Sanghar, and the affidavit of Rana Muhammad Arshad Khan, Advocate, Montgomery, on the ground that no new evidence which had not been produced before the Tribunal or Court below, can be taken into consideration in writ matters. In support of his contention, he relied upon the decision of their Lordships of the Supreme Court in Pakistan v. R. S. Roopchand (1). In that case Yaqub Ali, J. (as he then was), observed as follows :- "Mr. Abdul Quddus Bihari also had with him copies of certain orders passed by the Ministry of Interior and Police authorities to show that Lachhmandas, Murlidhar and Govindram were externed from Pakistan before the 31st of December, 1956, which he said were made available to him during the pendency of these appeals. But we did not permit him to rely on them because it would have amounted to receiving additional evidence and substituting our own findings in place of the findings of the Custodian which, on the record before him, are not open to exception."
7. Mr. Hassan A. Shaikh, the learned counsel for the respondent in both the appeals, on the other hand, strongly supported the judgment of the learned Single Judge on the grounds-
(i) that a certified copy of the letter of the Rehabilitation Commissioner dated 11th March, 1957, was filed by appellant Abdul Ghaffar himself in his amended petition in writ petition No, 368/68, which showed that this could not have been a bogus or a forged letter ;
(ii) that the Chief Settlement Commissioner is not competent to revise or modify orders of the Rehabilitation Commissioner and consequently the order of the Rehabilitation Commissioner of 11th March, 1957 could not be cancelled or rescinded by the Settlement Authorities ; and
(iii) that the order of the Rehabilitation Commissioner of 11th March, 1957 has attained finality under section 7 of the Pakistan Rehabilitation Act, 1956, and therefore it cannot be rescinded or modified.
(iv) (1) P D 1967 SC 479
8. It was conceded by the learned counsel for the parties that the main issue in this appeal is whether the letter, dated 11th March, 1957, purporting to have been issued from the Board of Revenue and communicating the alleged decision of the Rehabilitation Commissioner, West Pakistan, is a forgery or a genuine document. It was conceded that if this was a genuine document and such letter was in fact issued, than the transfer of the Respondents' claims from Montgomery to Sanghar was validly made and the allotment of land made to them in Sanghar District could not be cancelled, though necessary legal action could be taken against respondent Iqbal Ahmad, if it was established that he had in fact purloined the claims of the respondents from the Patwari of Jaboke, Montgomery. It has, therefore, to be seen whether it was established before the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner by tangible evidence that this letter in fact was a forgery or whether the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner, in arriving at the conclusion that the letter was a forgery, has ignored or misread any material evidence.
9. Before dealing with the above main issue it will be convenient to examine some of the other submissions made by the learned counsel.
10. The first of these submissions was in regard to the extent and scope of the powers of the High Court in the exercise of its constitutional jurisdiction to interfere with a finding of fact arrived at by the lower Tribunal. It was held in Begum Wazir Ahmad Industrial Home v. Niaz Begum (1) that the "High Court could not interfere with the findings of the Settlement Commissioner even if upon the same facts a different view could be taken". In support of this view, reliance was placed on two decisions of the Supreme Court reported in Muhammad Munir Hussain v. Sikandar (2) and Rahim Shah v. Election Commissioner (3). In the former case it was observed : "It is well-settled that where a Court or Tribunal has jurisdiction and it determines that question, it cannot be said that it acted illegally or with material irregularity because it came to an erroneous decision on a question of fact or even of law". However, even in the said decision it was observed that the High Court's supervisory jurisdiction under the Constitution is assailable to its jurisdiction under section 115, Civil Procedure Code, except in two important respects ; first ; the former jurisdiction being a creation of the Constitution stands on a higher pedestal than that under section 115, Civil Procedure Code, second ; the former jurisdiction has a wider reach than the jurisdiction under section 115, Civil Procedure Code, which is confined to subordinate Courts". In Rahim Shah's case, it was observed as follows :- "The scope of interference in the High Court is therefore limited to the inquiry whether the Tribunal has in doing the act or undertaking the proceedings acted in accordance with law. If the answer is in the affirmative the High Court will stay its hands and will not substitute its own findings for the findings recorded by the Tribunal. Cases of no evidence, bad faith, misdirection or failure to follow judicial procedure, etc. Are treated as acts done without lawful authority and vitiate the act done or
(1) PLD 1976 SC 214 (2) P D 1973 SC 139 (3) P D 1973 S 24 proceedings undertaken by the Tribunal on this ground. Where the High Court is of opinion that there is no evidence proper to be considered by the Tribunal in support of some point material to the conviction or order, certiorari will be granted."
11. We may also refer on this point to one more decision of the Supreme Court, reported as Nawaz v.
Additional Settlement and Rehabilitation Commissioner (1), where it was observed as follows :- "The High Court, in the exercise of its writ jurisdiction, in a case like this, does not act as a Court of facts and ought not to enter into and decide disputed questions of fact, although it can interfere with a finding of fact given by a subordinate Court or a Tribunal or other authority if the finding is based on no evidences or is based on a complete misreading of the evidence."
12. It is clear from the above pronouncements of their Lordships of the Supreme Court that the scope of the authority of the High Court, in the exercise of its Constitutional jurisdiction, to interfere with a finding of fact recorded by a subordinate Court, tribunal or other authority, is very narrow and is limited to cases where the finding is based on no evidence or misreading of evidence or where material evidence has been ignored,
13. We also find force in the next submission of Mr. Khalid Ishaq that the case of the respondents for transfer of their claim is governed by the amended para. 13-A of the West Pakistan Rehabilitation Scheme, which para came into force with effect from 28th January, 1957, and not the original para 13-A of the scheme, as held by the learned Single Judge. The material date for the purposes of the application of the original or the amended para would be the date on which the order was passed under that para by the competent authority and not the date on which application for transfer of claim was made by an applicant or claimant. Since the purported order of the Rehabilitation Commissioner regarding transfer of the claims of the respondents to Sanghar District was made on 11th March, 1957, it is the amended para. 13-A and para 13-B of the scheme which will apply in the instant case, assuming of course that this order is genuine and was made on that date. This, however, will make no material difference in the case of the respondents, for even under the amended para. 13-A and para 13-B, the Rehabilitation authorities were authorised to transfer claims from one area to another. Under paragraph 13-B, which was deleted in October, 1958, even transfer of claim forms where allotments had been confirmed were permitted in cases of widows, orphans, old and infirm people who were unable to manage their lands, etc. The ground urged by the respondents in their application, dated 21st December, 1956, to the Rehabilitation Commissioner, West Pakistan, which was produced in Writ Petition No, 368 of 1958, was precisely that some of the claimants were orphans and widows. It was further admitted in their application that the allotments of the applicants had been confirmed in Montgomery. Faced with these facts, Mr. Khalid Ishaq (1) P LD 1970 SC 39 conceded that the Rehabilitation Commissioner was competent to transfer the claims of the respondents despite the fact that their allotments had been confirmed in Montgomery.
14. We also find force in the submission of Mr. Khalid Ishaq that appellant Abdul Ghaffar was a proper party in the writ petition out of which the present two appeals have arisen. Not only was he a party in the proceedings before Ch. Muhammad Hassan, the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner, but further the respondents themselves had made him a party in the writ petition.
Moreover, it were the lands provisionally allotted to him in Sanghar District which were allotted to the respondents in consequence of the transfer of their claims to the said District.
15, We find no substance in the submission of Mr. Hassan A. Shaikh, the learned counsel for the respondents, that the delegation of powers of the Chief Settlement Commissioner to Ch. Muhammad Hassan was confined only to matters falling under section 11 of the said Act. This contention stands fully negated by the notification of the Chief Settlement and Rehabilitation Commissioner, Pakistan. No, 103 (DSC)- 6125-1-Ad-Reh/64, dated 4th December, 1964, whereby Choudhri Muhammad Hassan was delegated all the powers of the Chief Settlement Commissioner under sections 10 and 11 of the said Act in respect of cases reported by the Director of Enforcement, Evacuee Property and Claims, C and other cases entrusted to him by the Chief Settlement Commissioner from time to time. Since the cases of the respondents had been entrusted to Choudhri Muhammad Hassan by the Chief Settlement Commissioner, the former was competent in respect of these cases to exercise the powers of the Chief Settlement Commissioner under both the said sections.
16. It now remains to be considered whether the letter of 11th March, 1957, purporting to be from the Rehabilitation Commissioner, West Pakistan, regarding the transfer of the claims of the respondents, is a forged or genuine document and whether the finding on this issue by the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner is based on tangible evidence. In holding that the said document is forged, the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner has relied upon two pieces of evidence or rather circumstances. The first was that the papers on which the alleged letter was issued were not traceable in the office of the Chief Settlement Commissioner. We are in respectful agreement with the view taken by the learned Single Judge that the mere absence of this letter from the official records would not necessarily lead to the inference that it was al forgery and that its loss may be attributable to the negligence of the staff of the Settlement Department itself or other causes. We may also point out that the said letter bore an outward number and if the letter had been a forgery the outward register of the Chief Settlement Commissioner or the Board of Revenue would have shown that either no letter with that number was issued from that office or that another letter with that letter had been issued. The second circumstance relied upon by the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner for coming to the view that the letter in question was a forgery was that the copy of the letter meant for the respondents was not produced by them. We may, however, point out that in their Writ Petition, out of which the present appeals have arisen, the respondents had categorically stated that during the proceedings before Choudhri Muhammad Hassan the original letter of tile Rehabilitation Commissioner was shown to him. The original letter or rather the copy meant for the respondents was produced before us and we found that it bears the signature of Mr. S. A. Latif, who was then admittedly Deputy Secretary, Board of Revenue, dealing with settlement matters. We may also point out that not only reference to the impugned letter of 11th March, 1957 is made by Mr. Anwer Adil, Rehabilitation Commissioner, Hyderabad and Khairpur Divisions, in his order, dated 18th June, 1958, which relates to the present parties, but he has relied upon it for the purpose of setting aside the allotments made in favour of Ghulam Mohiuddin, the predecessor in title of appellant Abdul Gaffar. The learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner has not taken this order into consideration nor the D. O. Letter, dated 17th November, 1958, from the Settlement Officer, Montgomery, to Mr. S. A. Latif, Deputy Secretary, Board of Revenue, wherein no mention has been made about the non-receipt by him of the letter of llth March. 1957, the original of which was addressed to him. It may be mentioned that the subject of his letter is: "Cancellation of Memorandum No, 10483-56/1175-R(9), dated 11th March, 1957, issued by the Board of Revenue to the Settlement Officer, Montgomery" and not 'forgery' of such a letter. This would suggest that the letter of 11th March, 1957 was perhaps cancelled and not that it was forged.
' In view of the above circumstances, even if we were to exclude from consideration the two pieces of evidence relied upon by the learned Single Judge in support of his finding that the letter of 11th March, 1957 is not a forgery, namely the certificate from the Deputy Commissioner and Additional Settlement Commissioner, San ghar, to the effect that the letter of 11th March, 1957 had in fact been received by his office, and the affidavit of Rana Muhammad Arshad Khan, Advocate, that he had found in file No, 2, relating to transfer of claims from Montgomery to Sanghar, the letter dated 11th March, 1957, on the ground that such evidence should not have been received in writ proceedings nor acted upon, we are of the respectful view that there was no evidence before the learned Deputy Settlement Commissioner on which he could come to the conclusion that the impugned letter, dated 11th March, 1957. Was a forgery. His finding on this point, in our view, is based not on tangible evidence but on mere surmises.
' For the reasons stated by us above, we are of opinion that there is no merit in these appeals. We would, therefore, dismiss the same with costs. revisions by the competent authorities. Therefore, it is advisable to consult the official sources or legal professionals for the most up-to-date and accurate information.