DURLAB SINGH SANT SINGH Vs. MEHR CHAND KHANNA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) In this petition, we are concerned with the New Delhi Parliamentary constitutency. The petitioner applied to the Chief Electoral Officer (4th respondent) for supply of a copy of the Electoral Roll, on 16th Jan. 1967. The office is alleged to have reported that no such copy was available, The petitioner claims that he approached the officer concerned again and the 4th respondent agreed to supply one copy partly in English and partly in Hindi. A copy was in fact supplied to the petitioner and it has been alleged in Paragraph 7 of the petition that it was neither properly arranged nor indexed, nor numbered. Besides, there were a large number of loose sheets adding to, altering or amending the various parts of the roll, without any indication on those snpplementaries and amending lists as to which particular part of the roll they pertained to.

(2.) The 1st respondent, Shri Mehr Chand Khanna filed two nomination papers, being Nos. 10 and 11 on 19th January, 1967. The petitioner filed objections against both the nomination papers which have been set out in Annexure 'A' to the petition. The substance of the objections was that part numbers of the electoral rolls with respect to the first respondent and his proposers were wrongly stated in the said nomination papers and in fact, such parts did not exist in the electoral rolls. For instance, in one of the nomination papers it was stated that name of the first respondent was borne in part 60 of the electoral roll and the allegation of the petitioner was that then existed no such part in the electoral roll of the constituency. The very same controversy has been raised in the petition also and it is for this reason that the 1st respondent has filed the electoral rolls, which were allegedly supplied to him. If those copies are taken as the correct copies, then there would be no mistake in the nomination papers.

(3.) 21st January 1967 was fixed for the scrutiny of the nomination papers and by order of the same date (Annexure 'B' to the petition), the objections of the petitioner were rejected. There are certain observations in the order on which strong reliance has been placed by Mr. V. S. Sawhney. the learned counsel for the petitioner, in aid of his argument that the Returning Officer failed to perform the statutory duty cast on him to effectively decide the question of the validity of the nomination papers. The position taken by the 1st respondent before the Returning Officer was that as a result of redelimitation of certain constituencies in New Delhi. the electoral rolls had been revised and the particulars contained in the nomination papers were in accordance with the revised rolls. The impugned order shows that the rolls relied upon by the first respondent were not available even in the election office. The Returning Officer in his order said "The records available in this office are numbered and listed by volumes and parts as urged by the objector and described above. On all of them are corrections which were not initialled by anybody. The amendment shown to me on behalf of the candidate (1st respondent) also bears hand-written corrections and numbers which is not initialled" The Returning Officer, however, as I look at the Order, founded his decision on the fact that the names of the candidates and his two proposers did exist in the electoral rolls, though it was not possible for him to verify the particulars from the records available with him. Probably, if I may surmise a bit, he thought that if the names existed on the electoral rolls, any mistakes about the part numbers, etc., did not amount to a substantial defect entailing the rejections of the nomination papers. It is noteworthy that under Section 30(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1961, the Returning Officer is onjoined not to reject any nomination paper on the ground of any defect which is not of a substantial character.