Modern day Bharat has no place for patriarchal notions: Delhi court

New Delhi: A Delhi Court has rejected an application filed by an Indian Army officer seeking CCTV footage of a hotel over the allegations that his wife was having an affair.

Civil Judge Vaibhav Pratap Singh said the "dated idea" of a man stealing away the wife of another man, without ascribing any role or responsibility to the woman, had to be rejected, as it "takes agency away from women and dehumanises them".

In an order passed on May 22, the judge dismissed the application of the husband for a direction to the hotel to provide booking details and CCTV footage of the common areas.

The application claimed that the wife, with whom he was involved in a marital dispute and divorce, visited the hotel with her alleged paramour.

The court said 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 right to privacy and to be left alone in a hotel would extend to the common areas as against a third party who was not present there and has no other legally justifiable entitlement to seek the data of the guest. Same would hold good for the booking details," the judge said.

Citing the novel The End of the Affair by author Graham Greene, the judge said that the burden of fidelity rests with the one who made the promise, and that it was not the lover who betrayed the marriage but the one who made the vow and broke it.

The outsider was never bound by it, the judge said.

He added, "The dated idea of a man stealing away 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".

He added that even Parliament has given its imprimatur to the jurisprudence when, while doing away with the colonial penal law, it enacted the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and did not retain the offence of adultery, showing that "the modern day Bharat has no place for gender- condescension and patriarchal notions."

The judge further said courts were not meant to serve as investigative bodies for private disputes or as instruments for collection of evidence in internal proceedings, especially when no clear legal entitlement to that evidence exists.

The court said that the wife and her alleged paramour were central to the husband's claims but they were not impleaded in the suit, which raised significant questions about their right to be heard before any disclosure was made.