A case filed by N.P. Ponnuswami, an Assembly election aspirant from Namakkal, had led the Supreme Court to deliver a landmark verdict in 1952, upholding the Madras High Court’s decision that it could not interfere in an election process once it was notified by the Election Commission of India. The right inference of the term, ‘election’, was also defined by the full court, comprising Chief Justice of India M. Patanjali Sastri and Justices S. Fazl Ali, Mehrchand Mahajan, B.K. Mukherjea, S.R. Das, and N. Chandrasekhara Aiyar.
In November 1951, the Returning Officer had rejected the nomination of Ponnuswami for the Madras Legislative Assembly on certain grounds. Aggrieved by this, he moved the Madras High Court under Article 226 of the Constitution seeking a direction to the Returning Officer to include his name in the list of validly nominated candidates. The court dismissed the writ petition on the ground that it had no jurisdiction to interfere with the order of the Returning Officer in view of the provisions of Article 329 (b) of the Constitution. Challenging this order, Ponnuswami moved the Supreme Court.
Election petition
According to Article 329 (b), no election to Parliament or legislature “shall be called in question except by an election petition presented to such authority and in such manner as may be provided for by or under any law made by the appropriate Legislature.”
Ponnuswami’s argument was that questioning something which had happened before a candidate was declared elected was not the same thing as questioning an election. His main contention was the word, ‘election’, would etymologically mean “the result or the final selection of a candidate”. He contended that the fact that an election petition could be filed only after polling was over and what was normally called into question by such a petition was the result bore out the contention that the word, ‘election’, could have no other meaning in Article 329 (b) than the result of polling or the final selection of a candidate. Therefore, he argued that the action of the Returning Officer could be questioned before the High Court.
However, Justice Ali, who authored the judgment with which the Chief Justice of India and others on the Bench concurred, noted that the word, ‘election’, in Article 329 (b) had, by long usage in connection with the process of selection of proper representatives in democratic institutions, acquired a wide as well as narrow meaning.
“In the narrow sense, it is used to mean the final selection of a candidate which may embrace the result of the poll when there is polling or a particular candidate being returned unopposed when there is no poll. In the wide sense, the word is used to connote the entire process culminating in a candidate being declared elected,” he pointed out.
A ground to question election
The verdict held that any matter which had the effect of vitiating an election should be brought up only at the appropriate stage in an appropriate manner before a special tribunal and should not be brought up at an intermediate stage before any court. “It seems to me that under the election law, the only significance which the rejection of a nomination paper has consists in the fact that it can be used as a ground to call the election in question,” Justice Ali wrote. “If the grounds on which an election can be called in question could be raised at an earlier stage and errors, if any, are rectified, there will be no meaning in enacting a provision like Article 329 (b) and in setting up a special tribunal. Any other meaning ascribed to the words used in the Article would lead to anomalies, which the Constitution could not have contemplated, one of them being that conflicting views may be expressed by High Court at the pre-polling stage and by the election tribunal, which is to be an independent body, at the stage when the matter is brought up before it,” he said.
‘Compendious expression’
“The decision of this appeal, however, turns not on the construction of the single word, ‘election’, but on the construction of the compendious expression — ‘no election shall be called in question’ in its context and setting, with due regard to the scheme of Part XV of the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Evidently, the argument has no bearing on this method of approach to the question posed in this appeal, which appears to me to be the only correct method,” according to the verdict delivered in the earliest election-related case in Independent India.
Similar ruling
The court also pointed out that besides the Madras High Court, seven High Courts had held that they had no jurisdiction under Article 226 of the Constitution to entertain petitions on improper rejection of nominations.
“This view is, in my opinion, correct and must be affirmed. The appeal must therefore fail and is dismissed. In view of the nature and importance of the points raised in this appeal, there should be no order to costs,” the verdict concluded, setting to rest as to what constitutes an election and at what stage it could be challenged by an aggrieved party.
