India SC: voting is statutory

India’s Supreme Court said on April 10 that the right to vote and the right to contest elections are statutory rights created by law, not fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. (livelaw.in) A bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and R. Mahadevan made the ruling in a dispute over elections to Rajasthan’s District Milk Producers’ Cooperative Unions. The court set aside Rajasthan High Court rulings that had struck down several union bye-laws on candidate eligibility. (indianexpress.com) The judgment said voting and contesting are two different legal interests. Voting is the act of casting a ballot under a statutory scheme, while contesting is an additional right that lawmakers can limit through qualifications, disqualifications, and other eligibility rules. (caseciter.com) The case arose from bye-laws numbered 20.1(2), 20.1(4), 20.2(7), and 20.2(9), which governed who could run for boards of directors at district milk unions in Rajasthan. Representatives of some primary societies challenged those rules in writ petitions, and both a single judge and a division bench of the High Court ruled against the bye-laws before the Supreme Court reversed them. (livelaw.in) The court tied this ruling to older election law precedents, including *Jyoti Basu v. Debi Ghosal* in 1982 and *Javed v. State of Haryana* in 2003. In those cases too, the court said election rights exist only to the extent a statute grants them. (barandbench.com) That point has not been framed the same way in every recent Supreme Court opinion. LiveLaw and Bar and Bench both noted that in the 2023 Constitution Bench decision in *Anoop Baranwal*, Justice Ajay Rastogi described the right to vote as a fundamental right, while the majority treated it as a constitutional right rather than a purely statutory one. (livelaw.in) (barandbench.com) The April 10 ruling also narrowed the route for challenging cooperative election rules in court. The bench said Rajasthan’s district milk unions are autonomous cooperative bodies, not “State” entities under Article 12 of the Constitution, and said election disputes should ordinarily go through the statutory remedies in the Rajasthan Cooperative Societies Act, 2001. (livelaw.in) The court also said the High Court proceedings were flawed because affected parties were not impleaded before the bye-laws were struck down. It restored the presumption that subordinate legislation remains valid unless it clearly violates the parent statute or the Constitution. (caseciter.com) The ruling does not take away voting in parliamentary or assembly elections, which continue under election statutes such as the Representation of the People Act. It does mean courts are likely to keep treating the franchise and candidacy as rights defined by legislation, especially in disputes over who may run and how specialized elections are regulated. (moneycontrol.com)