When property is not registered in your fathers name so you have file suit for declaration court against vendors or their legal heirs after that you get mutation in the joint names of you three. You are declared as owner on the principle of adverse possession also. Discuss
If a person does not protest someone illegally occupying his property for 12 years, then the squatter would get ownership rights over that property, the Supreme Court has ruled.
A bench of Justices R K Agrawal and A M Sapre said if a person proved actual, peaceful and uninterrupted possession of a property owned by another for more than 12 years, “a case of adverse possession can be held to be made out which, in turn, results in depriving the true owner of his ownership rights in the property and vests ownership rights of the property in the person who claims it”.
However, the bench put in a caveat by ruling that such a person (squatter) must necessarily first admit ownership of the true owner over the property and make the true owner a party to the suit before a court for claiming ownership over the property through adverse possession.
This ruling came in a case where a Muslim man had claimed ownership over a property through adverse possession in Jalgaon of Maharashtra. He had attempted to advance the plea of adverse possession to claim ownership rights over the property, which was inherited by a Muslim woman after the death of her father.
Setting aside a Bombay high court order in favour of the man, the SC bench said, “When both courts below held and, in our view rightly, that the defendant has failed to prove the plea of adverse possession, then such concurrent finding of fact was unimpeachable and binding on the HC. The HC erred fundamentally in observing that it was not necessary for the defendant to first admit the ownership of the plaintiff before raising such a plea.”
In other words, whether Article 65 of the Act only enables a person to set up a plea of adverse possession as a shield as a defendant and such a plea cannot be used as a sword by a plaintiff to protect the possession of immovable property or to recover it in case of dispossession