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Kamal Nath v. Election Commission of India & Ors.

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2018 INSC 968Decided 12 Oct 2018
Writ Petition (Civil) No. 935 of 2018
Justice A.K. Sikri · Justice Ashok Bhushan

Background

Ahead of the 2018 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, Kamal Nath, as President of the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee, filed a writ petition (along with a connected petition) seeking two main reliefs: directions for random Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) verification at 10% of polling stations, and a direction that the Election Commission of India (ECI) supply the draft electoral roll to political parties in a searchable, editable "text mode" rather than a scanned image PDF, citing the Election Commission's own Election Manual and alleging large numbers of duplicate or fake voters in the rolls.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that "text mode" in the ECI's Election Manual referred only to the content of the roll (textual elector details, as opposed to photographs) and not to a technically "searchable" file format: the ECI was not legally bound to provide a machine-searchable PDF. It accepted the ECI's explanation that providing only image-based PDFs was a deliberate privacy safeguard against voter data-mining and profiling, consistent with the recognised right to privacy. On VVPAT verification, the Court noted this exact relief had already been addressed in an earlier case (Prakash Joshi v. Election Commission of India) and declined to grant fresh directions. Both writ petitions were dismissed.

Lesson Learnt

Wording in an administrative manual, here, "text mode", will be interpreted by courts according to its plain, intended meaning, not stretched to grant a broader right than the words support; and the Election Commission's privacy-based justifications for its data-sharing format were accepted as reasonable in balancing transparency against voter privacy.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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