Office-bearers whose terms ended in January are still in office. Madras High Court sends the Church of South India dispute to the civil court

Justice D. Bharatha Chakravarthy holds a writ petition neither maintainable nor entertainable, and points the parties to the Section 92 suit already pending over the same Constitution.

The Church of South India is a union of twenty-four dioceses — twenty-three in south India and one in Jaffna — governed by a written Constitution and run by office-bearers the Synod elects. Those office-bearers are described in the cause title of these petitions as the ex-Moderator, ex-General Secretary and ex-Honorary Treasurer, their terms having ended in January 2026. The petitioners say they are nonetheless continuing in office. The Madras High Court has declined to decide that in writ jurisdiction, and has sent the parties to the civil suit where the Church's Constitution is already being litigated.

What the Church is, and what is in dispute

The Church is a body concerned with the churches of the United Protestant denomination. It is represented by clergy and laymen nominated by the dioceses, collectively the Synod, which also elects its office-bearers, and it is governed by a document titled the Constitution of the Church of South India, 2016 — by-laws covering the entire gamut of its activities, with the Synod Secretariat at Royapettah in Chennai.

The underlying litigation is a suit under Section 92 of the Code of Civil Procedure, in which the reliefs sought include a permanent injunction restraining amendment of the Church's Constitution and by-laws or the implementation of amendments made at a Special Synod Council meeting in March 2022; the appointment of a former Judge of the High Court as Administrator to frame guidelines for the administration and management of the Church's affairs; and an enquiry into pending disputes affecting the Electoral College.

The civil court has already been managing the elections. By an order of January 2023 it permitted the ordinary meeting of the Synod and the election to go ahead, subject to conditions: the entire proceedings to be recorded by appropriate audio-visual equipment and presented to the court; the election to be conducted by the ballot process prescribed by the Constitution; the results not to be declared until further orders; and any office-bearer elected who would have been ineligible but for the disputed amendments not to claim equities when the interlocutory applications were finally disposed of.

Why the writ petitions failed

The petitioners' route to Article 226 ran through the Church's educational institutions. The respondents in the writ petitions include the Directorates of Collegiate Education, School Education, Technical and Vocational Training, and Medical and Nursing Education, the Principal Secretary of the School Education Department, and the Registrar of Companies — the idea being that who holds office in the Synod affects the aided schools, colleges and medical institutions the Church runs.

The Court held the petition not maintainable, because the petitioners are directly concerned only with the administration of the Church and its office-bearers.

It then did something more useful than stopping there: it assumed the contrary and explained why it would still refuse. Even stretching the position to say that different office-bearers may nominate different educational agencies and persons, so that there is a nexus with the administration of schools and colleges, the petitions were held not entertainable for five reasons.

The entire issue arises directly out of the civil proceedings pending by way of the Section 92 suit and the import of the orders passed in them. The core illegality complained of is the personal action of four individuals who, on the petitioners' case, have completed their terms but continue in office on an untenable claim. An application with the same prayer is said to be pending in that very suit. On the petitioners' own case the institution is a public charitable trust, and a suit under Section 92 is generally the more appropriate remedy, because the Court there exercises parens patriae jurisdiction with a view to protecting the trust, the dominant purpose of such proceedings being the scheme of administration and precisely such contentious questions as terms of office and the term of the ordinary meeting of the Synod. And because leave is normally obtained in that jurisdiction, all interested parties have a say and the Court decides authoritatively — which may include framing a scheme and providing for the appointment, removal, selection or election of trustees or other managing bodies, with mechanisms for the future.

The point about forum

The last of those reasons is the substantial one, and it is worth separating from the question of whether a writ lies.

A writ court deciding who may hold office would answer one question between the parties before it. Section 92 is designed for the whole problem: it brings in everyone interested, it permits the court to frame a scheme of administration, and it allows the court to provide for how trustees and managing bodies are chosen in future. For a body of twenty-four dioceses whose governing document is itself under challenge, a declaration about four individuals would leave the structural dispute exactly where it was.

That also explains the Court's unusual closing direction. Having dismissed the petitions and kept liberty open, it added that everyone concerned shall co-operate for the expeditious disposal and adjudication of the lis as and when such civil proceedings are filed — an instruction aimed at the pattern these disputes fall into, where an institution's affairs are run by interim orders for years while the suit makes no progress.

Order

The writ petitions were held not to be an appropriate vehicle for the issue to be gone into under Article 226. The parties were told they may approach the civil jurisdiction by taking out applications in the pending suit, or that the petitioners or any of them may file a suit — either under Section 92 or by generally claiming relief against individuals alleged to be acting in excess of their power or without jurisdiction.

Keeping that liberty open, the writ petitions were dismissed with no costs, and the connected miscellaneous petitions were closed. The order is marked a speaking order, indexed, with a neutral citation.

For religious and charitable institutions the judgment is a reminder of where these fights belong. Disputes about who holds office in a trust, church or society reach High Courts in writ jurisdiction with some regularity, usually dressed as grievances about the institutions the body runs. This judgment separates the two: the schools and colleges may be regulated by the State, but the question of who may sit as Moderator is a question about the trust's own constitution, and the Code provides a jurisdiction built for it.