Law has loopholes for use of religion, caste in poll campaign: SC

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, October 20

The seven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur on Thursday said the ban on seeking votes on the basis of religion, caste or language appeared to be inadequate to ensure that poll campaigns were free from these issues.

The bench said going by the arguments of litigants’ counsel it was clear that Section 123 of the Representation of People Act 1951 had banned only the candidates, their parties and agents from appealing to the voters in the name of their respective religions.

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The candidates could overcome this impediment by taking the help of people belonging to other castes and religions to exploit the voters’ sentiments, the bench noted.

“You seem to be arguing that though it is desirable to keep religion and caste out of electoral politics, the legislature has chosen to bar only the candidates and their agents and parties from seeking vote” on these lines, the bench told senior counsel Shyam Divan who was arguing for one of the litigants in batch of petitions on the issue.

“Can there be a ban on discussion of religion and caste in election meetings,” the bench asked Divan.

The other members of the bench are Justices MB Lokur, SA Bobde, AK Goel, UU Lalit, DY Chandrachud and LN Rao.

Meanwhile, social activist Teesta Setalvad and two others pleaded for intervening in the case, contending that the apex court could come to the right conclusions only if it heard the views of neutral persons like them, instead of restricting the proceedings to the winning and losing candidates.

“Parties in the present appeals are people with allegiance to some political party or the other hence their submissions may not necessarily uphold the Constitutional framework,” they said in their application. Theatre activist Shamsul Islam and journalist Dilip Mandal are the other applicants.

They found fault with the apex court’s 1996 ruling that reference to Hindutva and Hinduism could not be construed as misuse of religion as these two expressions only denoted a way of life, not the Hindu religion.