LITIGANTS, LAWYERS AND JUDGES continues...

I used to go to Montgomery or Pakpattan where the case was being tried by the Land Acquisition Collector. Our contention partly succeeded and Nawab Ahmad Yar Khan was awarded a few lakhs for these trees. The Government appealed to the High Court. Dewan Ram Lal, the Advocate-General, contended for the Punjab Government that the keekar trees had only fuel value while I argued that keeker is a tree which is put to numerous uses in the Punjab and is of great value to agriculturists. I reeled off the uses to which it could be put as described in a volume of the Punjab Gazetteer, an official publication. The branches are used as tooth brushes, while its bark is used in brewing country liquor and tanning. The timber is used for building proposes and making ploughs while the useless parts only are used as fuel. Eventually Government’s appeal was dismissed.

In I935, I decided that my eldest son, Daya Krishan Mahajan, who had qualified himself for the Bar, should take up practice in our ancestrial place at Dharamsala where my father used to practice and where his library, house, and furniture had been kept intact waiting for his grandson. Daya Krishan started practice in 1936.

When Joginder Nagar Hydro-Electric scheme was taken up, a huge amount of money—more than double the amount estimated—was spent on it. When the matter was raised in the Punjab Assembly, the ministers declared that the object of the scheme was to benefit rural Punjab and to supply electricity to the villagers at cheap rates. Taking advantage of these declarations, I decided to ask for an electric power connections for irrigating a piece of about 50 acres of land close to my garden house in village Mamoon about half a mile from Pathankot. I wanted to instal a pump to lift the water of a canal that runs through the compound of my house. When I asked the department to give me an electric connection fort the pump, I was asked to deposit Rs. 20,000 as the cost of laying down the line.

to be continued....