Sankaran Govindan v. Lakshmi Bharathi

This is the Indian correction to English law on the fraud exception, and it is the case that lets you say something distinctively Indian in an answer that would otherwise be all English authority.

It matters because of what it protects. If a losing defendant may reopen a foreign judgment by repeating, in the Indian court, the very fraud allegation the foreign court has already heard and rejected, then conclusiveness under s. 13 is worth nothing. Sankaran Govindan draws the line by controlling the evidence rather than by abolishing the exception.

The course states the case for the principle, in a passage about the fraud defence. Do not supply a narrative of your own; the proposition is the examinable content.

Mathew J. quoted the criticism of the English position with approval and refused to follow Abouloff v. Oppenheimer. He "said he was not prepared to accept a position which would permit a retrial of an issue already determined by foreign court, under the guise of alleging fraud."

Trickery must be established "not by the same evidence adduced in the foreign court, but by new evidence not known to the parties at the time of the former trial."

Step one: take the English rule at its widest and see what it costs. Abouloff allows the defendant to make the same charge of fraud and to adduce the same evidence in support of it, and Vadala v. Lawes confirms that the whole case may be reopened even though that means going into the very facts investigated abroad. The consequence, which the course records, is that conclusiveness is "materially and most illogically prejudiced".

Step two: identify the real objection. It is not that fraud should be unpleadable. It is that a retrial of a decided issue should not be available under the guise of alleging fraud. The vice is the disguise, not the plea.

Step three: cure it with an evidential filter. Keep the fraud exception, but require the trickery to be shown by new evidence not known to the parties at the time of the former trial. Old evidence, already weighed by the foreign court, cannot ground the plea. This lets a genuinely defrauded party in and keeps the disappointed litigant out, because a party who has already run the point has, by definition, no new evidence.

Step four: note the residue. The filter operates on fraud going to the merits. Where the fraud goes to the jurisdictional facts, Satya v. Teja Singh and Y. Narasimha Rao allow the court to look again, because there the complaint is not that the foreign court decided wrongly but that it was misled into assuming a competence it never had.

It opens: Is a foreign judgment conclusive? Discuss the exception of fraud under s. 13(e) CPC — and any comparative question on the Indian and English positions.

The sentence to write: Indian law requires new evidence for a fraud plea; English law does not.

Build the four-case argument. Abouloff and Vadala for the English width; Sankaran Govindan for the Indian limit; Satya and Narasimha Rao for the jurisdictional-fraud exception to that limit. Add that India also reopens the merits to the narrow extent s. 13(b) allows — asking not whether the foreign decision was right but only whether the foreign court applied its mind to the facts and the law, which is the limit drawn in Mallappa Yellappa v. Raghavendra, with D. T. Kaymer v. P. Viswanathan as the case where the merits had not been investigated at all.

It does not decide: that fraud is no defence — it plainly is, under s. 13(e). Nor does it touch fraud on jurisdictional facts, where the more generous approach survives. And it says nothing about the other clauses of s. 13; do not cite it for want of jurisdiction, natural justice or public policy.