Articles 325 to 329

In one line

The five remaining articles of Part XV say who may vote, on what roll, who makes the detailed election law, and when a court may be asked about any of it, and the answer to the last question is: not until the election is over.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 325 requires one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency and forbids exclusion from it on grounds only of religion, race, caste or sex; article 326 makes elections to the House of the People and to every State Legislative Assembly turn on adult suffrage; article 327 empowers Parliament, and article 328 a State Legislature so far as Parliament has not acted, to make the detailed election law; and article 329 bars the courts, clause (a) from questioning a delimitation law and clause (b) from entertaining any challenge to an election otherwise than by an election petition. In N.P. Ponnuswami v. Returning Officer, Namakkal Constituency the Court held that "election" in article 329(b) means the whole process and not only the result, that Part XV "is really a code in itself", and that the improper rejection of a nomination paper cannot be taken to the High Court under article 226 while the election is going on.

Why the law has this at all

An election has a great many stages and every one of them can be got wrong. Rolls are prepared, constituencies drawn, nominations filed, scrutinised, accepted or rejected, symbols allotted, a poll taken, votes counted, a result declared. If each step could be litigated as it happened, an election could be stopped indefinitely by anybody with a grievance and a lawyer, and the House would sit short of members while the arguments went on.

The Constitution's solution is to postpone, not to abolish. Every wrong done during an election has a remedy, but the remedy comes at the end and it comes before a special forum. That is a choice to accept individual hardship for the sake of the whole. Ponnuswami quotes both sides of it from the Madras decisions: that "any post election remedy is wholly inadequate to afford the relief which the petitioner seeks", and against that "the inconvenience to the public administration of having elections and the business of Local Boards held up while individuals prosecute their individual grievances".

The provisions

Article 325 provides: "There shall be one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency for election to either House of Parliament or to the House or either House of the Legislature of a State and no person shall be ineligible for inclusion in any such roll or claim to be included in any special electoral roll for any such constituency on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex or any of them."