Van is not a car

EXPERT EYE

In the early eighties there was a ban on the use of foreign cars by government officials. So in the customs department we could not appropriate foreign cars, which had been confiscated and not redeemed by the importers. They had to be necessarily sold and not appropriated for use by the officials of the department.

The logic of the government was unexceptionable. It did not want the officers to flaunt foreign cars. However, it led to queer results. As Collector of Customs, I had several Mercedes Benz vans, which were valued at several lakhs of rupees because the brand Mercedes was precious. However, nobody would like to buy a Mercedes van because a van doesn't have the snob value that a Mercedes car has. So the successive auctions failed miserably to fetch the minimum price below which they could not be sold.

So we were faced with a piquant situation where neither could we sell them nor could we use them. I wrote several times to the ministry explaining the situation but it always quoted the ban on foreign cars, which was said to have been imposed at the instance of the then highest.

I was looking for an opportunity to solve this impasse. One day, I had a bout of lateral thinking. I went the Secretary (Revenue) who was indeed a very positive and innovative type, and told him that a ban on foreign cars should not be taken as a ban on vans.

The intention of the ban on cars was to prevent the ostentatious display by the officers. Certainly, the officers should not be seen moving around in imported cars. That is not a good example at all. At the same time, no officer would move around in a foreign van to show off. So the vans, though of Mercedes brand, would not be used by the officers except for specific official work.

The Secretary got convinced and agreed to not apply the ban on vans. Van is not a car, I argued, for the purpose of this ban. He agreed, keeping the intention of the ban in mind. So we were allowed to appropriate the vans for official use. These vans were used for taking officers to conduct raids, searches etc., which is purely official work and for which in any case we would have to buy more Indian cars.

This underlines a very important principle of interpretation of words. Words should be understood in the proper context and not just on the basis of the text. The interpretation should be purposive and not literal. It should go beyond the meaning of the plain word used. It should not be interpreted in such a way that it leads to absurd results.

This simple principle has been a source of perpetual debate in the judicial parlance. There is a set of judgments which prefers the strict rule of construction, which had been laid down in the Cape Brandy Case in 1921 (Cape Brandy Syndicate versus Inland Revenue Commission "" 1KB64P.71) followed by several judgments by the Supreme Court as in C.I.T., Bombay versus Elphinstone Spinning and Weaving Mills Co Ltd "" 1960(40) ITR142(SC), etc. The opposite set of judgments includes the one in the case of C.I.T. versus National Taj Traders "" AIR 1980 SC 485 and many others.

After reading all of them, the conclusion one arrives at is that when there are two interpretations, one strictly literal and the other, though not so literal, serves the intention of the legislature, we have to choose the latter.

smukher2000@yahoo.com