So found South Delhi resident Ramesh Chopra, 73, who wanted to stay together with his

US-returned daughter and grandchild, who do not have a house of their own in Delhi. The senior citizen did what any landlord in that situation would have done: he asked his tenant, Sardar Surjit Singh Arora, to vacate his eight-room house.

Arora, though, refused to vacate. The dispute soon reached the Rent Control Court, which decided Chopra’s requirement of the house was “bonafide”.

“The landlord required at least eight rooms to meet his requirement of one bedroom and a drawing room for himself and his wife, one bedroom and a drawing room for the daughter’s family, one dining room, one puja room, and one servant’s room,” the Rent Control Court ruled earlier this year.

But Arora moved the High Court, armed with a set of arguments to “convince” Justice Shiv Narayan Dhingra why his landlord “did not,in fact, need the house” at all. He told a visibly surprised judge that daughters, once married, did not form part of the family. So, “requirements of daughters cannot be considered as requirement of the landlord.”

He thereafter classified his landlord’s family as belonging to the “poor strata of society”, one that “did not require more rooms”.

The house owner, Arora contended, does not require a dining room since there is “no tradition in the family” of “taking (their) meals together. There is no requirement of a separate guestroom as no one visits the landlord’s family. He does not require a separate bedroom since he does not have a big family, and they belonged to the poor strata of society.”

As for the puja room, he dismissed it with a simple conclusion: “He (Chopra) did not believe in God.”

But stopping Arora in his tracks, Justice Dhingra noted that this case is a “classic example” of how the Delhi Rent Control Act is misused by tenants to “blackmail” landlords. On Arora’s “flimsy” reasons for refusing to vacate the house, Justice Dhingra observed, “The tenant cannot dictate the living standards of the landlord. It is not up to the tenant to dictate whether his landlord is a believer in God, or whether he should have a separate guestroom or bedroom…. The tenant is not the judge.”

On a married daughter’s right to her parents’ property, the Bench said: “No distinction can be made between the requirement of a son and that of a daughter. A son and daughter can both be dependent on their parents for residence.”

“Here, the requirement is genuine as the daughter is living on tenanted premises and wants to live with her parents. More so, when the landlord has no son and in his old age has only daughters to take care of him and his ageing wife.”