The Waqf Board must answer the questions: interrogatories ordered because they can shorten the litigation
A Division Bench of Justices Anil K. Narendran and Muralee Krishna S. dismisses four appeals by the Kerala State Waqf Board, holding that the Tribunal cannot be faulted for allowing interrogatories under Order XI Rule 1 where the Board claimed no privilege over the information sought.
Parties before the Waqf Tribunal at Kozhikode wanted to know whether the Kerala State Waqf Board had followed the mandatory procedure for registering a waqf before it passed an order against them in 2019. Rather than wait for the point to emerge at trial, they asked to put written questions to the Board. The Tribunal allowed it and gave the Board a month to answer. The Board appealed four times over. On 6 October 2026 a Division Bench of the Kerala High Court dismissed all four appeals and gave the Board a fresh month to comply — on the straightforward ground that the power to order interrogatories exists to shorten litigation and should be used when it can.
Four appeals from one kind of order
The appeals were filed as MFA (WAQF) Nos. 13, 14, 15 and 17 of 2026, each directed against an order dated 20 December 2025 passed by the Waqf Tribunal, Kozhikode on an interlocutory application in one of four Waqf Original Applications of 2025. Those applications themselves arose out of an order of 20 May 2019 made by the Kerala State Waqf Board in a much older execution proceeding.
The applicants' contention before the Tribunal was that before passing the order of 20 May 2019, the State Waqf Board had not complied with the mandatory provisions and the procedures prescribed by the Waqf Act, 1995 for the registration of the waqf; and that, for the adjudication of the issues in the original applications, it was necessary to direct the Board to answer interrogatories which would clarify the issues and were relevant to a fair determination of the disputes.
The Tribunal agreed. Considering the disputes between the parties and the issues arising in the original applications, it found that the interrogatories were relevant and necessary for a fair adjudication and were “not vexatious or unnecessary”. It also recorded a point that mattered on appeal: the Board had no case that the information sought could not be disclosed on the ground of any privilege or other valid reason. By the impugned orders it granted permission to deliver the interrogatories and directed the Board to answer them within one month.
What interrogatories are for
The Division Bench's reasoning on the merits is brief and rests on the purpose of the procedure.
The object of serving interrogatories is to enable a party to require information from his opponent on facts relevant to the “matters in question”, for the purpose of maintaining his own case or of destroying the case of his adversary. And that power “should be used by the court or tribunal whenever it can shorten the litigation”. Given that object and purpose, the Bench held, the Waqf Tribunal could not be found fault with for allowing the applications filed under Order XI Rule 1 of the Code by the impugned orders of 20 December 2025.
What the Bench did not have to decide is as instructive as what it did. The Board did not assert privilege over the material, and did not contend that the information was one it could not disclose. Stripped of that objection, an order requiring a statutory authority to answer written questions about whether it followed its own statutory procedure is an ordinary case-management measure, not an intrusion.
The judgment also canvasses, in the course of its discussion, the circumstances in which a prematurely instituted proceeding may be fatal rather than curable — where premature institution before the lapse of a particular time or the occurrence of a particular event would defeat a public policy or purpose; where it renders the presentation patently void with an incurable invalidity going to the root of jurisdiction; where the dispute is not confined to the parties but affects others, as in an election petition touching an entire constituency; and where the leave of a court or authority is mandatorily required before instituting a suit and was not obtained.
There is a wider point in the way the Bench disposed of the appeals. An order for interrogatories is interlocutory, and four separate first appeals against four such orders, each from a different original application in the same group of disputes, is a considerable use of appellate time to resist answering written questions. By treating the Tribunal's reasoning as unimpeachable and simply resetting the clock on compliance, the judgment leaves the Board where it started, a year later.
Order
The appeals failed and were dismissed. The Bench granted the appellant Board one month's time from the date of receipt of a copy of the judgment to comply with the directions contained in the Tribunal's orders of 20 December 2025.
The effect is that questions first put to the Board in 2025 will be answered on the record of the Tribunal, and the issue of whether the registration procedure under the 1995 Act was followed will be addressed on documents and admissions rather than inference.