Introduction
Indian civil courts often confront the difficult gap between a decree on paper and its enforcement in reality. The Bombay High Court’s order in the Krishnani flat dispute (WP/416/2016) illustrates this gap with unusual starkness: a Division Bench directed the D. N. Nagar Police to assist in enforcing a preliminary decree that had been resisted for over sixteen years, holding that finality once attained in execution proceedings cannot be reopened, even though both original petitioners passed away before the fruits of their decree could be realized.
Background and Facts
The dispute concerned a flat at the Karachi Citizens Co-operative Housing Society, Andheri-Versova Link Road, Mumbai. In 2010, Vanita Mohan Krishnani and her husband, Mohan Tahilram Krishnani, instituted a Suit before the Civil Court against their son and daughter-in-law seeking determination of their respective shares in the property. In January 2011, the trial court passed a preliminary decree in the parents’ favor, determining the shares of the parties in the suit property, and simultaneously restrained the son and daughter-in-law by way of injunction, from entering the premises and from creating nuisance therein.
Notwithstanding the preliminary decree and the accompanying injunction, the son and daughter-in-law continued to remain in occupation of the flat. The parents made repeated representations to the police, lodging non-cognizable complaints alleging harassment and nuisance, but these complaints yielded no tangible relief. Faced with continued non-compliance, the parents, in 2016, approached the Bombay High Court by way of a writ petition under Article 226 of the Constitution, seeking directions to the police to act in aid of the decree.
During the pendency of the writ petition, both original petitioners died Vanita Krishnani in March 2022 and Mohan Krishnani in June 2025 without having seen the decree enforced.
Before the Hon’ble High Court, the son and daughter-in-law resisted execution on two grounds: that the 2011 decree, being merely preliminary in nature, could not by itself found or sustain an eviction; and those other proceedings, including appeals, remained pending, with alternative remedies available under the ordinary civil and criminal law. It was in this backdrop that the matter came to be finally decided by the Division Bench in its order dated July 2026.
The Legal Framework: Execution and Writ Jurisdiction
As a matter of ordinary civil procedure, decrees are executed under Order XXI of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908[1], with objections to executability confined to the limited scope of Section 47. However, where a decree-holder is persistently obstructed in reaping the fruits of a decree, High Courts have, in appropriate cases, invoked their extraordinary writ jurisdiction under Article 226 to issue directions including directions to the police to secure compliance. This is a distinct, supplementary remedy; it does not reopen or re-adjudicate the merits of the underlying decree but ensures that a right already crystalized is not defeated by continued, unlawful resistance.
The Court’s Reasoning
The Bench rejected the contention that a preliminary decree could not found an eviction, holding that the question of executability stood conclusively settled by the Supreme Court’s order of October 2015, which had specifically granted the parents liberty to initiate execution proceedings when an order against which the son’s appeal was itself dismissed by the Supreme Court in December of that year. In the Bench’s view, this rendered the executability of the 2011 preliminary decree beyond further challenge, and the son could not, at this belated stage, be permitted to reagitate a proposition that already stood settled by a superior court.
The Bench further held that sixteen years of non-compliance amounted not to a series of isolated or excusable defaults, but to one continuing and deliberate pattern of obstruction. It observed that litigants “cannot be permitted to reopen at the stage of execution what has already attained finality,” and that to countenance such conduct would be to render the decree-holder’s rights illusory. The Bench also took note, with evident concern, of the fact that both petitioners had died before witnessing enforcement of a decree they had secured as far back as 2011 a circumstance which, in the Bench’s own words, was itself a telling comment on the delay inherent in the execution process.
Comparative Position: Senior Citizens Act
The Krishnani order is consistent with a wider judicial trend of protecting senior citizens against prolonged dispossession by resistant family members, whether relief is sought under ordinary decree-execution or under the Senior Citizens Act, 2007. In Chandiram v. Senior Citizens Appellate Tribunal, 2025 SCC OnLine Bom 2457[2], the Bombay High Court set aside the impugned order of the Appellate Tribunal and restored an order of eviction of a son and daughter-in-law from a self-acquired bungalow, holding that the Tribunal had erred in treating the dispute as “merely civil” in character.
The Court’s reasoning in Chandiram (supra) is instructive: the bungalow was undisputedly self-acquired property of the senior citizen; no independent right, title, or interest was shown to subsist in favor of the son or daughter-in-law; and no order under the maintenance, residence, or domestic violence framework existed to sustain the daughter-in-law’s claim to continued occupation, a claim further undercut by the fact that she had, in the interim, acquired a house of her own. The Court held that mere permission to reside does not ripen into an independent, enforceable right once relations between the parties turn hostile, and that a hyper-technical approach by the Appellate Tribunal had defeated the very purpose of the statute.
By contrast, in Sakunthala v. Appellate Authority (2026), the Madras High Court upheld a floor-swap arrangement for stair-impaired elderly parents, holding that such a “regulation of occupation” did not amount to an eviction and was not in conflict with a subsisting injunction. Read together, Chandiram and Sakunthala demonstrate that the Hon’ble Courts have been willing to fashion whatever remedy to enforce eviction, police assistance in execution, or an internal regulation of occupation best secures the substance of a senior citizen’s rights against continued, resistant occupation by family members.
Conclusion
The Court’s reasoning in Krishnani (supra) is instructive. It affirms a proposition of considerable practical significance: once a decree, even a preliminary one has attained finality and its executability has been affirmed by a superior court, that finality cannot be unsettled merely by the passage of time or by continued, unlawful occupation. In directing the police to enforce a sixteen-year-old decree, the Hon’ble Bombay High Court has reaffirmed that the machinery of the law remains available, and effective, in vindicating rights that have already been conclusively determined. That, Vanita and Mohan Krishnani did not live to see their decree enforced is a poignant reminder of the human cost of delay in execution; yet the order itself stands as a meaningful and constructive contribution to the jurisprudence protecting senior citizens’ rights, reaffirming that courts will not permit finality to be defeated by attrition, and that the vindication secured by a decree-holder however long deferred remains fully capable of enforcement.
[1] https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/13813/1/the_code_of_civil_procedure%2C_1908.pdf
[2] http://www.scconline.com/DocumentLink/v6W1A2ZV
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