Gurugram: A property dispute that began the year Bishan Singh of Sankhera village in Haryana’s Yamunanagar died—1979—has finally ended, 47 years later, with the high court ruling firmly in favour of the woman he lived with till his last days.
Bishan Singh, a Jat farmer who owned nearly 24 bighas of ancestral land, died childless and unmarried in the eyes of his own nephews. He had willed his property to Smt. Debo, a woman he had lived with for years.
His nephews, sons of his brother Beli Ram, challenged that will in court, arguing that Debo was never legally Bishan’s wife, that she belonged to a different caste, and that Jat customary law did not even allow a man to will away ancestral land in the first place.
The nephews lost at the trial court in 1987. They lost again at the first appellate court in 1991. On 6 July this year, Justice Harkesh Manuja of the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed their final appeal too, closing a legal battle that had outlived most of the original parties.
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‘She served him, he provided for her’
In court, Debo had pleaded that Bishan Singh had contracted a karewa with her about five years before his death. Karewa is an arrangement in Haryana and Punjab, where the brother or relative of a deceased man assumes responsibility for his widow in a simple ceremony.
However, the nephews’ strongest argument was that Debo could not have had a valid karewa with Bishan Singh because he was a Jat and she was a Rajput, and customary law permitted karewa only between a widow and a relative of her deceased husband.
The nephews leaned on an earlier HC ruling that had rejected an inter-caste karewa claim on similar grounds.
The court did not need to settle that question at all. It found that Bishan Singh himself had never disputed Debo’s status as his wife in a 1978 court decree that transferred half his land to her, a decree he lived with and never challenged till his death. That alone, the judge said, closed the door on the nephews revisiting the issue decades later.
More significantly, the court held that even if the marriage was never proved, that did not doom the will. Citing a 2022 Supreme Court ruling, the judge noted that a childless landowner is free to reward a person who lived with him and served him in his final years, regardless of whether that person was legally his spouse.
“It is nobody’s concern as to whom he gives the properties to,” the Supreme Court had observed in that case, a line the HC found squarely applicable in Bishan Singh’s case.
Court examines colonial-era record
On the customary law argument, the court accepted that Jat custom generally frowns on willing away ancestral property.
The plaintiffs had argued that Bishan Singh, being a Jat governed by the general customs of zamindars, had no right to bequeath or transfer the ancestral suit land at all.
The court turned to a colonial-era record to test that claim: Question 69 of the Riwaj-e-am of Ambala district, a document British administrators compiled in the 19th Century to codify local customary practices for revenue and inheritance purposes. That entry records that wills, as a legal concept, were largely unknown among Hindu tribes, including Jats, when it came to defeating an heir’s claim over immovable ancestral property.
What families in the region actually did, the record notes, was different—arrangements loosely described as “wills” were in practice lifetime gifts, made openly and with the knowledge and consent of collaterals, and not secret testamentary documents sprung on relatives after death.
The court leaned on this reading through its own precedent, a 1981 Punjab and Haryana High Court ruling in Nathu Ram versus Jug Lal, which had examined the same Riwaj-e-am provision in detail.
That judgement held that while the general custom does restrict a Jat proprietor from willing away or gifting ancestral land, the custom was never absolute. It carved out a well-established exception: a sonless proprietor could still make such a disposition, treated in law as a gift, not a will, in favour of a near agnate, or of someone who had personally served him, placing that person on a par with a close relative for this limited purpose.
Bishan Singh, admittedly without children, fell squarely within that exception, noted the court. It found that no rigid or absolute custom had been proven that would bar him from providing for Debo, whom the record showed had cohabited with him and rendered him personal service.
The nephews had also tried to knock down Bishan Singh’s will on technical grounds, arguing that one of the men who witnessed it did not live in the same village as Bishan Singh, and that Debo herself was present when the document was signed.
The court rejected both objections as insufficient to raise real suspicion, noting that a witness living in a neighbouring village or a beneficiary’s mere presence during execution does not, by itself, prove undue influence. The will, duly registered and independently backed by testimony of an attesting witness, was held to have been properly proved in law.
With that, the HC affirmed the lower courts’ decisions in full and dismissed the appeal.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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