Revoking permissive possession, demanding vacant possession, and demanding a full account
Sent by Registered post with acknowledgement due
Date: 3 April 2026
FROM THE OFFICE OF Harpreet Singh Bajwa, ADVOCATE
Chamber No. 14, District Courts, Civil Lines, Jalandhar, Punjab 144001
Enrolment / Bar Council registration: P/1234/2009
This notice is issued through me as Advocate, on the written instructions of my client named immediately below, and is set out in my client's own words. Your reply must be addressed to me at the address above, with a copy to my client.
FROM (the Owner)
Gurmeet Singh Sandhu, son of Late S. Joginder Singh Sandhu, a Non-Resident Indian
27 Hollybush Lane, Southall, Middlesex UB1 3AJ, United Kingdom
Address in India for reply and service: C/o S. Balwinder Singh, Village Kotli Than Singh, Tehsil Phillaur, District Jalandhar, Punjab 144410
Email: gurmeet.sandhu@example.com
Telephone: +44 7700 900123
TO (the Occupant)
Sukhwinder Singh (Sukha), son of Late S. Mohinder Singh
Village Kotli Than Singh, near Gurudwara Sahib, Tehsil Phillaur, District Jalandhar, Punjab 144410
AND TO Jaspal Singh and Ranjit Kaur, being his son and wife, and Mangat Ram, the tenant inducted by him in the front room, at Jaspal Singh at House No. 214, Model Town, Phillaur, District Jalandhar, Punjab 144410; the others at the Property, and to every other person in occupation of the Property through, under or along with Sukhwinder Singh (Sukha). Each of you is put to notice in the same terms; a separate copy of this notice has been posted to each of you at every address known to me; and none of you may hereafter plead ignorance of it.
SUBJECT — Your unauthorised occupation of agricultural land at Village/Town Kotli Than Singh (Kotli Thakran), Tehsil Phillaur, District Jalandhar, Punjab: revocation of the permission under which you entered, demand for vacant possession within 15 (fifteen) days, and demand for a full and true account within 15 (fifteen) days.
Sir / Madam,
TAKE NOTICE as follows.
1.1 I am Gurmeet Singh Sandhu, son of Late S. Joginder Singh Sandhu, a Non-Resident Indian.
1.2 This notice concerns agricultural land, measuring 19 kanal 18 marla of land, and a house plot of 500 square yards, situated at Village/Town Kotli Than Singh (Kotli Thakran), Tehsil Phillaur, District Jalandhar, Punjab, and more particularly described in the Schedule at the end of this notice. That property is referred to below as "the Property".
2.1 I am the owner of the Property, having acquired it by inheritance from my late father.
2.2 The document or order under which I hold is: Mutation of Inheritance No. 4312, sanctioned by the Naib Tehsildar, Phillaur, on 14 March 2004 on the death of S. Joginder Singh Sandhu on 2 November 2003; and Sale Deed No. 1876 dated 9 August 1991, registered in Book No. 1, Volume 342, at pages 118 to 124, in the office of the Sub-Registrar, Phillaur, in favour of my late father. The original sale deed is not in my possession and is believed to be in yours.
2.3 My ownership appears from the following record: Jamabandi for the year 2021-2022 of Village Kotli Than Singh, Hadbast No. 214, Tehsil Phillaur, District Jalandhar: Khewat No. 87, Khatauni No. 121, Killa Nos. 12//5, 12//6 and 13//1, share 1/1, recorded in my name pursuant to Mutation of Inheritance No. 4312 sanctioned on 14 March 2004. The khasra girdawari for kharif 2025 records self-cultivation and names no tenant.
2.4 An entry in a record-of-rights prepared and maintained under the Punjab Land Revenue Act, 1887 is presumed to be true until the contrary is proved — section 44 of that Act — and a person who disputes such an entry is left to a suit for a declaratory decree under section 45. You have not displaced that presumption, and you cannot displace it by continuing to sit on the Property.
3.1 You are my elder brother.
3.2 You were permitted to enter upon and occupy the Property on or about 1 April 2026, as a caretaker, to look after the Property in my absence.
3.3 The arrangement on which you were permitted to remain was this: In or about April 1994, at the family home and in the presence of my mother and my maternal uncle, my late father permitted you to occupy the house and to cultivate the land as our own man while our family was abroad. Nothing was reduced to writing, because you are family. You were never a tenant, no theka was fixed and no rent was agreed. It was agreed that you would keep the house in repair, pay the electricity and water charges out of the produce, and remit one half of the net proceeds of each harvest to my father. You remitted a share for the rabi and kharif harvests up to 1999. Nothing whatever has been remitted since the rabi harvest of 1999, and no account of any kind has ever been rendered.
3.4 Your occupation was therefore permissive from the very first day. You entered by leave and licence and not in any right of your own. You have never at any time held the Property adversely to me, and no length of permissive occupation converts a licensee into an owner. Possession that begins with the owner's permission does not become adverse by the mere passage of years; it becomes adverse only upon an open and hostile denial of the owner's title, brought to the owner's knowledge.
3.5 A licence confers no interest in the land. It is a personal permission, revocable at the will of the grantor, and it comes to an end when the grantor revokes it — the position under the Indian Easements Act, 1882 and, so far as that Act does not itself govern the arrangement, under the same principles applied as rules of justice, equity and good conscience. You acquired no interest, no tenancy, no charge and no right of any kind in the Property, and you were never at any time my tenant, whether of a building or of agricultural land.
3.6 So that what stands on the ground is on the record from the outset, neither overstated nor concealed, this is what I understand you to have built upon or spent upon the Property, and when: In or about 2007 you roofed the rear verandah in RCC and added a room of about 12 feet by 14 feet on the eastern side of the courtyard, and in or about 2012 you raised a brick boundary wall along the northern side. I do not know what you spent, I did not consent to any of it, and I was not told of it at the time. The submersible tubewell on Killa No. 12//5 was installed and paid for by me in 2019. Whatever was built or spent was built or spent upon land that was and remains mine, under a permission which this notice revokes, and it gives you no title to a single marla of it. If you contend that any of it was work of a permanent character executed on the faith of my permission, say so in your reply in terms, with dates, with the amounts and with the vouchers, so that the question is decided on documents rather than on recollection.
4.1 I hereby revoke, withdraw, cancel and terminate, with immediate effect and absolutely, every permission, leave, licence, authority, indulgence and arrangement — express or implied, oral or written, whenever given and by whomsoever given, whether by me or by any predecessor in title of mine — under or by virtue of which you have occupied, used, cultivated, let out or dealt with the Property or any part of it.
4.2 With effect from the date on which you receive this notice, your occupation of the Property is wholly without authority and without any right, title or interest, and every day of it is a continuing wrong for which you are answerable to me.
4.3 The period of 15 (fifteen) days allowed by clause 7 below is allowed to you as a reasonable time to remove yourself, your family, your servants, your cattle and your goods from the Property. It is an indulgence extended so that you are not put to hardship. It is not an admission of any right in you and it is not an extension of any permission.
5.1 I have learnt that you now deny my title to the Property and set up a claim of your own. The particulars are these: On 12 January 2026, when I visited the village with my son, you refused to open the main gate and told me in the presence of Sh. Amar Nath and Sh. Kewal Krishan that the house and the land are yours, that you have been in possession for thirty years and that I have no right left. On 20 January 2026 I obtained a nakal of the jamabandi from the Fard Kendra and found that an application for mutation had been moved in your name on the strength of a will said to have been executed by my late father on 6 June 2002, of which I had never heard and which I deny.
5.2 I first came to know of that denial on 2 April 2026. I record that date deliberately and I record it now, because it is the date that matters and because I will not have it invented for me later.
5.3 The legal position is stated so that you understand it before you take advice on it. Article 65 of the Limitation Act, 1963 allows a suit for possession of immovable property based on title within twelve years, and that period runs from the date on which the possession of the defendant becomes ADVERSE to the plaintiff — not from the date on which he entered. Section 27 of the same Act extinguishes the owner's right only at the determination of that period. Your possession, having been permissive throughout, could not and did not become adverse at any time before 2 April 2026. Any plea by you of adverse possession, of thirty years' occupation, of long enjoyment or of acquiescence is therefore misconceived, is denied in advance, and is answered by the whole of clause 3 of this notice. Possession, to be adverse, must be open, continuous, hostile to the true owner and to his knowledge, and asserted as owner; caretaking is none of those things.
5.4 Nothing in this notice, and nothing done or omitted by me at any time, is or is to be treated as an admission that your possession has ever been adverse to me, or that any period of limitation has begun to run against me.
6.1 You are called upon to produce to me, within 15 (fifteen) days of receipt of this notice, a legible copy of every document, order, entry and instrument on the strength of which you claim any right in the Property — including any sale deed, gift deed, will, agreement to sell, receipt, power of attorney, affidavit, family settlement, partition memorandum, mutation, khasra girdawari entry, municipal record or utility record. Produce them now. Do not produce them for the first time in the witness box.
6.2 Every mutation entered, applied for, attested or sanctioned in your favour or in favour of anyone claiming through you in respect of the Property is denied, disputed and challenged, and I reserve the right to have it set aside. A mutation is a fiscal entry made under sections 34 to 37 of the Punjab Land Revenue Act, 1887 for the purpose of the revenue record. It neither creates nor extinguishes title, and sanctioning it transfers nothing which the underlying instrument did not itself transfer.
6.3 If you claim under an agreement to sell, a general power of attorney, a will, or any combination of those, you claim under nothing. In Suraj Lamp & Industries (P) Ltd. (II) v. State of Haryana, decided on 11 October 2011, the Supreme Court held that such transactions do not convey title and are not a valid mode of transfer of immovable property, which passes only by a registered deed of conveyance, subject to the limited protection of section 53A of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882. No such bundle of papers makes you the owner of my Property, and I will say so wherever it is produced.