B. Basavalingappa vs D. Munichinnappa

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: supreme-court

Case Number: Civil Appeal No. 401 of 1964

Decision Date: 23 September 1964

Coram: K.N. Wanchoo, P.B. Gajendragadkar, M. Hidayatullah, Raghubar Dayal, J.R. Mudholkar

In the matter titled B. Basavalingappa versus D. Munichinnappa, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on 23 September 1964. The judgment was authored by Justice K. N. Wanchoo, who sat together with Justices P. B. Gajendragadkar, M. Hidayatullah, Raghubar Dayal and J. R. Mudholkar. The petitioner was B. Basavalingappa and the respondent was D. Munichinnappa. The case was reported in the 1965 volume of the All India Reporter at page 1269 and also in the Supreme Court Reporter (1965) at page 316, with subsequent citations appearing in later law reports. The issue arose under the provisions of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, as applied to elections for a Scheduled Castes constituency, and specifically involved the question of whether the Voddar caste could be treated as the same community as the Bhovi caste for the purpose of eligibility to contest the Bangalore South (Scheduled Castes) seat.

The factual background was that the respondent, identified as “M,” had been elected from the Bangalore South (Scheduled Castes) constituency. M asserted that he belonged to the Bhovi caste, which was listed among the Scheduled Castes in the 1950 Order. The petitioner challenged this claim, alleging that M actually belonged to the Voddar caste, a community that was not mentioned in the Order, and therefore argued that M was not entitled to contest a seat reserved for Scheduled Castes. The Election Tribunal recorded evidence on behalf of M indicating that the Voddar caste was essentially the same as the Bhovi caste. Relying on this evidence, the Tribunal concluded that Bhovi was a sub‑caste of Voddar, that M did not belong to the Bhovi sub‑caste, and consequently that he was ineligible to stand for election from the reserved constituency. The High Court, however, held that although the Voddar caste was not expressly named in the Order, the circumstances existing in 1950 justified treating the Bhovi caste mentioned in the Order as equivalent to the Voddar caste. On that basis the High Court dismissed the election petition. By special leave, the petitioner appealed to this Court, contending that the High Court erred in examining the Tribunal’s evidence to equate Bhovi with Voddar, and that the Tribunal should not have entertained evidence that effectively altered the exhaustive list of Scheduled Castes provided in the Order, which already included alternative names and spellings. The Court examined the evidence and observed that at the time the Order was framed, no caste known as Bhovi existed in the then Mysore State, making it unlikely that the Order intended to recognise a non‑existent community. Accordingly, the Court held that it was necessary to determine which community the term “Bhovi” was intended to designate, and that the Tribunal was justified in recording and relying upon evidence to identify the appropriate caste.

The Court observed that evidence may be recorded only in extraordinary circumstances, and it is not generally permissible for any person to present evidence to prove that his caste includes or is identical to another caste listed in the Order, as indicated by the cited authorities. The appeal before this Court arose under civil appellate jurisdiction as Civil Appeal No. 401 of 1964, brought by special leave from the judgment and order dated 14 October 1963 of the Mysore High Court in N.F.A. No. 139 of 1963 and M.F.A. No. 141 of 1963. Counsel for the appellant and counsel for respondent No. 1 appeared, and the judgment was delivered by Justice Wanchoo. The matter concerned an election to the Bangalore South (Scheduled Castes) constituency held in February 1962, in which four candidates, including the appellant and respondent No. 1, Munichinnappa, contested. Respondent No. 1 received the largest number of votes and was declared elected. Subsequently, the appellant filed an election petition challenging that election on several grounds, but the present appeal focuses solely on the question of whether respondent No. 1 belonged to any of the scheduled castes enumerated in the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, hereinafter referred to as the Order. Respondent No. 1 claimed that his caste was the Bhovi caste listed in the Order. The appellant asserted that respondent No. 1 was a Voddar and that the Voddar caste was not among those specified in the Order, thereby rendering respondent No. 1 ineligible to stand for election from a scheduled‑caste constituency. The Election Tribunal held that the Bhovi caste mentioned in the Order was a sub‑caste within the broader Voddar caste and that only this sub‑caste, not the entire Voddar caste, was covered by the Order. Accordingly, the Tribunal found that respondent No. 1 did not belong to the Bhovi sub‑caste and was therefore disqualified from contesting the scheduled‑caste seat, setting aside the election and ordering a fresh poll. Respondent No. 1 appealed to the High Court, contending that he was a member of the Bhovi caste as specified in the Order and thus entitled to stand for election. The High Court held that, although the Voddar caste as such was not listed in the Order, the historical facts and circumstances at the time of the Order’s promulgation in 1950 indicated that the Bhovi caste referred to in the Order was essentially the Voddar caste. Consequently, the High Court allowed the appeal, held that respondent No. 1, being a Voddar, should be deemed a member of the Bhovi caste mentioned in the Order, and dismissed the election petition. The High Court subsequently refused leave to appeal, resulting in the present special leave petition before this Court.

The appellant obtained special leave from this Court, and consequently the present dispute was placed before the Court for determination. The appellant’s principal argument was that a person may contest an election from a scheduled‑caste constituency only when he belongs to a caste that is expressly listed in the presidential Order. The appellant further contended that it is impermissible for any individual to assert that, although he does not belong to a caste named in the Order, he belongs to some other caste that is, by implication, covered by the listed caste. According to the appellant, when a caste is known by more than one name, the Order records the alternative name in brackets, and when a caste name appears in variant spellings, the Order places all such spellings together in a single entry. The appellant therefore argued that the Order’s entry for the caste “Bhovi” does not contain the name “Voddar” in brackets or any alternative spelling, and consequently the Tribunal was not authorized to admit evidence suggesting that the Voddar caste is identical with the Bhovi caste. The appellant further urged that the High Court erred in examining the evidence produced before the Tribunal and in concluding that the term “Bhovi” in the Order was intended to refer to the Voddar caste. In the appellant’s view, that evidence should have been excluded by the Tribunal, and, absent such evidence, the respondent – who belongs to the Voddar caste – could not be permitted to stand for election because the Voddar caste is not mentioned at all in the Order.

The appellant relied upon Article 341 of the Constitution, which governs the identification of Scheduled Castes. Article 341(1) provides that the President, after consulting the Governor of a State, may by public notification specify the castes, races, tribes, or any part or group within them that shall, for constitutional purposes, be deemed Scheduled Castes in that State or Union territory. Article 341(2) adds that Parliament may, by legislation, include in or remove from the list of Scheduled Castes that the President has notified, but a notification issued under clause (1) cannot be altered by any later notification except as authorized by Parliament. The appellant emphasized that clause (1) intends to settle all disputes concerning whether a particular caste is a Scheduled Caste, allowing only those castes that are expressly notified to be treated as Scheduled Castes. Accordingly, the appellant submitted that the constitutional scheme makes the presidential notification final, subject only to modification by Parliament, and that the High Court’s approach conflicts with the requisites of Article 341 as interpreted by the appellant.

In this case, the Court explained that the Constitution provides for the President, after consulting the Governor of a State, to issue an Order under Article 341 that specifies the castes, races or tribes, or parts or groups within them, which shall be deemed to be Scheduled Castes for that State. Clause 2 of Article 341 then grants Parliament the authority, by legislation, to either include in or exclude from the list of Scheduled Castes any caste, race, tribe or part or group within any of them that has been mentioned in a notification issued under clause 1. By this provision, Parliament received the power to amend the President’s notification. Clause 2 further states that a notification issued under clause 1 cannot be varied by any later notification, thereby making the President’s notification permanent unless altered by an act of Parliament as provided in clause 2.

The Court noted that, consequently, Article 341 creates a system in which a notification is final and its content can be changed only through legislative action by Parliament. The appellant’s argument was based on this constitutional scheme. The appellant contended that once a notification is made it is final, that the President does not have the power to revise it, and that any alteration can occur only by Parliament adding or deleting entries through a law. Accordingly, the appellant submitted that, because of this strict constitutional requirement, no person may introduce oral or documentary evidence to bring a caste within the ambit of the notification unless that caste is expressly named in the wording of the notification.

On that basis, the appellant urged that the Tribunal had erred in permitting evidence that the Voddar caste was the same as the Bhovi caste mentioned in the Order, and that the High Court was likewise erroneous when it held, on the strength of such evidence, that the Voddar caste was identical to the Bhovi caste specified in the Order. The High Court’s finding had led to the conclusion that respondent No. 1 was qualified to contest the election because he belonged to the Voddar caste, which the Court said was the same as the Bhovi caste.

The Court observed that it is not permissible to modify the Order by presenting evidence that, for example, although only caste A is listed in the Order, caste B is in fact a part of caste A and therefore should be deemed included. The Court further pointed out that when a caste is known by another name, the Order normally records that alternative name in brackets after the principal name, citing examples such as “Aray (Mala) Dakkal (Dokkalwar)” and similar instances. Consequently, as a general rule, no party may lead evidence to establish that a caste B, as illustrated in the example, forms part of a caste A that is listed in the Order. Applying this principle to the present matter, the Court held that it would ordinarily not have been permissible to admit evidence asserting that the Voddar caste was identical to the Bhovi caste, because the Voddar caste does not appear in brackets following the entry for Bhovi in the Order.

The Court observed that the statement found in the Order could not, by itself, settle the dispute because the circumstances of the present case were unusual. The difficulty, the Court explained, stemmed from an undisputed historical fact: before the re‑organisation of 1956 the Mysore State did not have any community identified as Bhovi. Yet the Order referred to a scheduled caste called Bhovi as it existed prior to 1956. Consequently, the Court held that the President, after consulting the Rajpramukh, must have intended to include a specific caste when the Order named Bhovi as a scheduled caste. The Court could not accept that the President had listed Bhovi in the Order when no such caste existed in the pre‑1956 Mysore State. Since it was uncontested that there was no caste expressly known as Bhovi at that time, the only method available to the courts to discover which community the term was meant to designate was to examine relevant evidence. Had a Bhovi caste actually existed before 1956, no evidence could have been permitted to show that another caste was covered by that name. However, because the fact that no caste called Bhovi existed was established, the presence of the name Bhovi in the Order created a need to determine the actual community intended by the term. This special situation required the Court to admit evidence to identify the caste that the word “Bhovi” was meant to represent in the Order, given that no such caste was known in Mysore prior to the 1956 re‑organisation.

Turning to the material that had been produced, the Court noted that the parties relied on a communication addressed to the Government of Mysore in 1944 on behalf of the Voddar community, together with an Order issued by that Government in February 1946. According to the evidence, the Voddar community had convened a conference in July 1944 where a resolution was passed to change the community’s name from Voddar to Bhovi. That resolution was subsequently processed through the Secretariat. Finally, an Order dated 2 February 1946 directed that the community formerly known as “Vodda” should henceforth be called “Boyi” in all government communications and records. Thereafter, all official records referred to the Voddar community as Boyi, and it was not contested that Voddar and

It was observed that the term Vodda referred to the same community as had previously been called Voddar. Consequently, the Court found it reasonable to infer that when the President issued the Order in 1950, after consulting the Rajpramukh of Mysore as required by the Constitution, the President intended to include the Vodda community under the designation Bhovi, relying on the earlier Order of the Government of Mysore dated February 1946. The Court noted that it would address the question of differing spellings later, but it was clear that the Order of 1950 did not mention the caste by the name Voddar because the 1946 Order had already changed the official name of that community for all governmental purposes. The Court explained that had the 1950 Order used the term Boyi, there would have been no difficulty in concluding that it referred to the Voddar community, since the 1946 Order expressly recorded that the Voddars had abandoned their original name and adopted the name Boyi from that year onward.

It was, however, urged that the Order of 1950 did not refer to Boyi at all but rather to the caste Bholvi, and that the Order itself accommodated variations in spelling for the same caste, citing examples such as Bhambi, Bhambhi, Shenva and Chenva. The Court considered that argument and observed that when the Order listed the caste Bhovi, it could not be referring to the Voddar community, because the name change sanctioned by the Mysore Government in 1946 had been from Voddar to Boyi, not to Bholvi. The Court further recognized that the contention that different English spellings of the same caste were expressly provided for in the Order had some merit, as the Order demonstrated a practice of recording alternative spellings.

The difficulty, the Court noted, re‑emerged when examining whether the term Bhovi in the 1950 Order was intended to denote the Voddar caste, given that there was no caste known as Bhovi within the Mysore State as it existed in 1950. Since the President could not have included a non‑existent caste in the Order, the Court concluded that the word Bhovi must correspond to some existing caste in Mysore prior to the re‑organisation of 1956, and that the precise identity of that caste could be established only by evidence. In this regard, the Court referred to the High Court’s finding that, since the 1946 Order, the Voddar community had been variously rendered in English as Boyi, Bovi and Bhovi, although the Kannada term remained the same. Accordingly, the High Court had not attached any significance to the differences in English spelling in the unique circumstances of the present case.

The Court also drew attention to the notification issued by the Government of Mysore on 2 February 1946, which spelled the Voddar caste in three different ways within the same document: once as Voddara, again as Yoddar, and in two instances as Vodda. This multiplicity of spellings reinforced the view that the English spelling variations should not be given decisive weight when determining the caste intended by the term Bhovi in the 1950 Order.

The Court observed that the same notification used the spellings “Yoddar” and, in two other instances, “Vodda.” Accordingly, the Court held that no excessive weight could be placed on the English spelling of the caste name in this matter, because it was already established that no distinct caste called Bhovi existed in Mysore State prior to 1956. Consequently, the Court needed to determine which actual caste the term “Bhovi” referred to in the Order. The Court further noted that another copy of the identical notification, issued by a different government department, rendered the name “Voddara” as “Vaddara” and wrote “Boyis” as “Bovis.” On the basis of these variations, the Court agreed with the High Court that, given the special circumstances of the case, the difference in English spellings should not be given importance, and that the term “Bhoviv” could be treated as identical to “Boyis.” The Court expressed that it was unnecessary to examine the various census reports cited by both the Tribunal and the High Court, since those reports merely demonstrated that the same caste had been spelled differently in different documents. In view of these considerations, the Court concurred with the High Court’s finding that respondent No. 1, although identified as belonging to the Voddar caste, fell within the scheduled caste of Bhovi mentioned in the Order. The Court reiterated that the evidence was examined only because there was unquestionably no caste named Bhovi in Mysore State before 1956, and it was necessary to discover which caste the Order intended by using that term. The Court added that, but for this factual circumstance, no party could have been permitted to present evidence asserting that, for example, caste A mentioned in the Order included or was the same as caste B, when caste A actually existed in the area covered by the Order. Accordingly, the Court concluded that the appeal could not succeed, dismissed it, and ordered that costs be awarded to the prevailing side.