Major vs Major: Plea for CCTV footage to prove adultery nixed

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court on Thursday rejected a plea by an Army officer seeking CCTV footage and booking details from a hotel as evidence for his allegations that his wife was having an affair with another officer. The court of Vaibhav Pratap Singh, civil judge, Patiala House Court, upheld the woman's right to privacy, noting that modern India rejected gender bias and patriarchal views.

"Even the Indian Parliament has given its imprimatur to this jurisprudence when, while doing away with the colonial penal law, it enacted the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and did not retain in it the offence of adultery. This shows that modern-day Bharat has no place for gender condescension and patriarchal notions," the judge said.

The court referred to a Supreme Court judgment in which a "pertinent observation" was made while relegating this relic of English law (adultery) to the dustbin of history.

The major had requested the hotel's booking details and CCTV footage for Jan 25 and 26, when he believed the alleged meeting between his wife and another major took place. However, when he filed for divorce, he did not make the wife or her alleged lover a party to the suit.

The hotel told the court that it saved CCTV recordings only for three months and the required footage was no longer available.

The court, emphasising that hotels have a duty to keep their guests' information and footage confidential and protect their privacy, said that the plaintiff hadn't provided any basis that would compel the hotel to release this private information. "The defendant hotel, which is not a party to the marital dispute, does not have any inherent obligation to disclose private guest information to the plaintiff, a third party," the judge noted.

Stating that hotels generally owe a "duty of confidentiality" to their guests and are required to protect the privacy of their records, including booking details and CCTV footage, the court said, "If accepted (request of the plaintiff), it would give any looky-loo an opportunity to obtain third-party data of people he has nothing to do with."

The judge said that the concept of 'stealing the affection' of a wife by another man, as if the woman is not in control of whom she loves, is dated and has been rejected, and deservedly so, by a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court, which struck down as unconstitutional Section 497 (adultery) of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, which punished only the man for adultery. "The dated idea of a man stealing the wife of another man without ascribing any role or responsibility to the woman is to be rejected. It takes agency away from women and dehumanises them," the court said.

Calling the plaintiff's grievance "a moral one, not a legal one", the judge said, "This court may sympathise with him, but that is no reason to grant an injunction when not allowed by the law. While he may have a cause, he certainly does not have a case."

Referring to the novel The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, later adapted into a movie, the court observed, "To paraphrase from the book, the burden of fidelity rests with the one who made the promise. It is not the lover who has betrayed the marriage, but the one who made the vow and broke it. The outsider was never bound by it."

The court, noting that the Army Act, 1950, and the extant rules provide specific procedures for handling complaints and presenting evidence, said the husband had to take such remedies to summon witnesses and could not use them to bypass or supplement internal mechanisms.