Litigation Strategy

Supreme Court: A Lessee Cannot Use Article 226 to Reopen a Title Dispute Its Landlord Already Lost

Deciding an appeal arising from a decades-old encroachment dispute over land in Hyderabad, the Supreme Court held that lessees claiming through a trust could not invoke Article 226 to protect their possession once the trust itself — after losing before the Division Bench and withdrawing its own Special Leave Petition with liberty only to file a fresh suit — was barred from doing so. The lessees' writ petitions, filed in their own names soon after the trust's remedy was confined to a civil suit, were themselves an attempt to keep the writ route open by other means.