Full Judgment
Tudball, J.
1. The facts of this case are as follows: Some thirty-eight years ago the applicant Gajadhar was convicted on a charge of theft under Section 380 of the Indian Penal Code and was sentenced to three months' rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 5. In the current year he made a complaint against the opposite party Haribua Chamar. In cross-examination he was asked 'whether he had been convicted in Khaki Baba's theft case and sentenced to three months' rigorous imprisonment. His reply was no.' Haribua Chamar applied to the Magistrate for sanction to prosecute Gajadhar for perjury, in that he had falsely stated that he had not been sentenced to three months' rigorous imprisonment in Khaki Baba's theft case. That sanction has been granted and it was upheld on appeal by the District Magistrate. Gajadhar has come to this Court on revision. It has been shown by the production of a public register that Gajadhar was convicted in a theft case some thirty eight years ago and sentenced to three months' rigorous imprisonment and a fine. The record has been destroyed and there is apparently nothing to show who was the complainant in that case, and as the matter stands the register apparently does not prove that Gajadhar was sentenced to three months' rigorous imprisonment in Khaki Baba's theft case. Even supposing. however, that he did falsely deny this conviction, it is obvious that the Magistrate trying the case ought, in simple justice, to have refused to allow such a question to be put to the witness. The fact that at the age of fourteen the man was convicted of petty theft (while nothing has been shown. against him in respect to the intervening years) was quite irrelevant to the trial before the Magistrate. Such a conviction would not be considered by any Court even if Gajadhar had been upon his trial for a subsequent offence. Nor is it fair or just to throw into a man's teeth a petty theft committed by him when he was. but a boy. It is difficult to under-stand, how any Magistrate could grant sanction to a private person to prosecute another in circumstances like this, and it is impossibly, for me to understand the frame of mind of the District Magistrate when he upheld such an order on appeal. It would be obviously persecution, not prosecution, to allow any such trial to go on. I allow the application. I set aside the order of the Court below.