ORDER : 1. There was a partition suit in O.S.No.114/1990; it was filed inter alia by the petitioners & three others against the respondents 1 & 2 herein; all the parties happen to be the children of one late Puttappa; however, 5th Plaintiff Smt.Nanjamma was his widow; properties comprised in the suit apparently are huge and several; suit was resisted by filing the Written Statements; this suit came to be decreed on 25.01.1995 in terms of evenly dated Compromise Petition; the said decree having been vacated on the ground of fraud & mispresentation in terms of 1st respondent-Mr.Nanjappa’s Misc. Case No.9/2009 decided on 27.11.2019, this writ petition is filed for laying a challenge thereto. 2. After service of notice contesting respondents having entered appearance through their counsel resist the writ petition making submission in justification of the impugned order and the grounds on which it has been constructed. During the interregnum between making of the Compromise Decree and filing of the subject Misc. Case, there were certain other legal proceedings for voiding the said decree; however, they do not have much significance to the adjudication of this writ petition. 3. Having heard the learned counsel for the parties and having perused the petition papers, this Court declines to grant indulgence in the matter for the following reasons: (a) The institution of the partition suit and resistance by the contesting defendants thereto upto a particular point of time & stage of the proceedings, is not in dispute; it is also not in dispute that a Panchayat was convened in the village under the leadership of one Mr.Sudhindra wherein several other villagers too had participated and that an undertaking was reached for the withdrawal of the suit; it is in this background, the respondent had put his signatures to the blank papers which have been misused for crafting a Compromise in English, foreign to the 1st respondent who admittedly is an illiterate villager, as rightly contended by his counsel; in matters of the kind, signed blank papers being given to some reliable person for effectuating Panchayat Teermaana of the villagers becomes probabalized; such things do happen in village life, can be presumed u/s.114 of the Evidence Act, 1872, there being absolutely no material indicating the contra. (b) The version of the 1st respondent herein that a Panchayat was held in the village with the participation of several persons and that a decision was taken for withdrawing the suit, is not only not disputed by the petitioners but is sought to be used as the substratum for sustaining the Compromise, as being its fall out; if the Panch decision was to withdraw the suit, presumably for bringing the battling parties to the negotiating table, this Court is at loss to know how a Compromise was put forth for securing a partition decree, especially when huge & several properties are in the suit fray; no plausible explanation for sustaining the said decree is forthcoming from the stand of the parties and the evidentiary material borne out by the record. (c) It has been a long settled position of law that a decree founded on a compromise is nothing but a contract with seal of the court superadded; ordinarily, such a decree can be voided on the grounds that avail for avoiding a contract; since such a contract is sanctified by the seal of court, the degree of proof of the grounds for such avoidance may be bit higher, is true; to bring in a contract, there has to be meeting of the minds and that this is militantly lacking in the case at hands inasmuch as what was decided in the Panchayat was the withdrawal of suit, whereas what has been brought about in the suit is a Compromise Decree; they are poles asunder; thus even if there is arguably no fraud, the Compromise Decree was unsustainable, since it was founded on an arrangement not animated by ad idem of the parties. (d) The vehement contention of learned counsel for the petitioners that the Compromise Decree having been acted upon by the petitioner and others cannot be voided regardless of the arguable merits, is bit difficult to countenance; no material is produced to prima facie show that the 1st respondent herein has acted upon the compromise and thereby caused a detrimental alteration of others to his advantage, and therefore he needs to be estopped from resiling; there is a specific admission in the cross-examination of petitioners’ side ie., RW-2 that even after entering of the compromise decree, petitioners have not tried to take possession from the 1st respondent of the land in Sy.No.34/5 admeasuring 4 Acres & 2 Guntas at Papanahalli village and that both this land & the house do belong to the 1st respondent, by virtue of his self-acquisition; no explanation is offered as to why this respondent has been permitted to continue in the occupation of the said property that is shown to have fallen to the share of others in the Compromise Decree for about a decade & a half and till now. (e) “Fraud vitiates everything …” said Lord Edward Coke centuries ago and since then all civilized jurisdictions have adopted it as a functional norm for restoring justice to the defrauded, arguable legal technicalities such as delay & laches, notwithstanding; our Apex Court too echoed the same in S.P. Chengalavaraya Naidu –vs-Jagannath, (1994) 1 SCC 1 when it made the following observations: “…‘Fraud avoids all judicial acts, ecclesiastical or temporal’ observed Chief Justice Edward Coke of England about three centuries ago. It is the settled proposition of law that a judgment or decree obtained by playing fraud on the court is a nullity and non est in the eyes of law. Such a judgment/decree by the first court or by the highest court has to be treated as a nullity by every court, whether superior or inferior. It can be challenged in any court even in collateral proceedings...” KERR ON THE LAW OF FRAUD & MISTAKE, 7th Edn, at page 8 states: “Civil Courts have an original, independent, and inherent jurisdiction to relieve against every species of fraud not being relief of a penal nature. Every transfer or conveyance of property, by whatever means it be done, is vitiated by fraud. Every transfer or conveyance of property, by whatever means it be done, is vitiated by fraud. Deeds, obligations, contracts, awards, judgments, or decrees may be the instruments to which parties may resort to cover fraud, and through which they may obtain the most unrighteous advantages, but none of such devices or instruments will be permitted by a Court of Equity to obstruct the requirements of justice. If a case of fraud be established, the Court will set aside all transactions founded upon it by whatever machinery they may have been effected, and notwithstanding any contrivance by which it may have been attempted to protect them.” (f) To invalidate a contract on which a Compromise Decree is founded, on the ground of fraud, it needs to be prima facie shown that the same was perpetrated contemporaneously with the antecedents that constitute a part of the transaction as res gestae; as already mentioned above, the Panchayat in the village had concluded that the suit be withdrawn, and immediately the papers were sought to be moved before the learned trial Judge; the gap between these two, is too short to be little for negotiating a settlement of partition of such huge properties; this apart, no circumstances are shown for deviating from the Panchayat decision, abruptly; in village life, things do not run that way; this Court is bewildered by the course of events, namely the withdrawal of dispute being converted into a settlement, in such too short a time; things of the kind can occur only in the fables like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and not in the real life of men fighting long drawn legal battles, as is the case here. (g) If a transaction in question has been founded on fraud ab inceptio, the original vice will continue to taint it, howsoever long negotiation might have been or into whatsoever ramifications it may extend; not only is the person who perpetrated the fraud is precluded from deriving any benefit under such a transaction, namely the so called compromise, as in this case, but even an innocent person is so likewise, subject to all just exceptions into which argued case of the petitioners does not fit; English Courts have gone to the extent of holding that even an express stipulation that, fraud shall not vitiate a contract, is bad in law; a covenant whereby a person seeks to save himself from false representation and the other party is sought to be precluded from having a remedy for fraud, is held to be illegal by Lord Atkin in Pearson vs. Dubling Corporation (1907) AC 351; that is the enormity of vice of fraud, in civilized jurisdictions; such a vice is rightly held to have been established by the learned Judge of the Court below by employing the rule of preponderance of probability; therefore impugned order cannot be faltered by this court in a limited supervisory jurisdiction constitutionally vested under Article 227 of the Constitution. (h) The vehement contention of learned counsel for the petitioners that the compromise petition runs into several pages and that all pages are signed by the two advocates of the sides, is true; however, it is only the last page which bears the signature of the 1st respondent and other parties; no explanation is forthcoming as to why the signature of all the parties have not been procured on all the pages of the compromise petition; prudence suggests that all pages ought to have been signed regard being had to hugeness of the properties involved; similarly, no explanation is forthcoming as to why the compromise petition is drafted in English when illiterate villagers happen to be the stakeholders thereunder; of course, it is not that every compromise petition should be in the vernacular; but the foreign language employed in the compromise petition, as it comes through in the fact matrix of the case at hands thickens the doubt & duplicity that infects the decree on which it is founded; admission of RW-2 as to the aforesaid land & building being the self acquisition of the 1st respondent and its introduction to the compromise decree coupled with uninterrupted continuance of the said respondent in occupation thereof for long years even after the decree was made, thickens the same further and probabilises the case of the contesting respondent. (i) Learned Judge of the Court below having considered all aspects of the matter has framed the impugned order in which are imbibed law & justice; it could have been done in a better way, is no ground for its invalidation, since it has brought a just result; Oscar Wilde had said “There is scope for improvement even in heaven…”; that applies to all instruments of art & science, and therefore to the impugned order and also to this judgment which affirms it; what the learned Judge has done is nothing more than recalling the decree founded on a fraudulent compromise. (j) Even otherwise, there was no ad idem ie., meeting of the minds of the parties as to the division of properties comprised in the compromise, if ground of fraud for argument sake, is taken to have not been established; it is so because ordinarily, negotiation in matters like this would have taken some reasonable period after the decision to withdraw the suit was made in the panchayat; the fact that the said panchas had directed withdrawal of suit raises a strong presumption that future talks were contemplated for bringing out an amicable settlement of the dispute for dividing the properties; if that be so, it becomes very difficult to countenance the contention that an amicable settlement was arrived at overnight defying the decision of panchas by the parties at loggerheads; thus, there was no legally enforceable agreement i.e., compromise on which a decree could have been founded; now that, the decree is voided by the court below and consequently suit is restored to the Board; parties can put forth their version by cogent evidence at their command and secure an appropriate decree in the suit. In the above circumstances, this writ petition being devoid of merits is liable to be dismissed and accordingly it is, costs having been made easy; consequent to impugned order being sustained, suit is restored to the Board for the trial & disposal, from the stage it was, when the decree on compromise, was entered. All contentions of the parties having been kept open, learned Judge of the jurisdictional court is requested to accomplish the trial & disposal of the suit preferably within an outer limit of one year, not being in any way influenced by the observations in the impugned order or in this judgment.