'Modern Bharat has no place...': Court rejects Army Major’s plea for hotel CCTV in adultery case against wife

The court also drew literary and legal references to buttress its conclusion.

A Delhi court on Friday dismissed a plea filed by a man identifying himself as a Major in the Indian Army, who had sought the CCTV footage and booking records of a hotel where he alleged his wife had spent time with another man—also claimed to be a Major—amid a pending marital dispute and divorce proceedings.

Civil Judge Vaibhav Pratap Singh of Patiala House Courts upheld the woman’s right to privacy, stating unequivocally that the right to be left alone extended even to the common areas of a hotel against a third party who was neither present at the location nor had any legally sustainable entitlement to the guests’ data.

“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. The same would hold good for the booking details,” the court said in its detailed order.

The judge rejected the man’s argument that he was entitled to access the information to prove adultery in his legal dispute with his wife. He observed that the notion of a man “stealing” the affection of another man’s wife was archaic and had been rightly discarded by the Supreme Court in Joseph Shine v. Union of India, which decriminalised adultery in 2018.

“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,” Singh noted.

The court also drew literary and legal references to buttress its conclusion. Citing the novel The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, the judge underscored the importance of respecting personal choices in intimate relationships. He further pointed out that even the Indian Parliament, through the enactment of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, had excluded adultery as an offence, demonstrating that “modern day Bharat has no place for gender-condescension and patriarchal notions."

In its reasoning, the court stated that hotels owed a duty of confidentiality to their guests, and this obligation included safeguarding the privacy of their records, such as booking details and surveillance footage. The judge observed that any disclosure in such cases would amount to a breach of that duty.

Significantly, the court also noted that neither the wife nor the alleged paramour had been impleaded in the proceedings. “The wife and her alleged paramour were central to the husband’s claims, yet they were not impleaded in the suit, raising serious concerns about their right to be heard before any disclosure was made,” the court stated.

Judge Singh made it clear that courts were not investigative agencies for private individuals seeking evidence in matrimonial disputes. “Courts are not meant to serve as investigative bodies for private disputes or as instruments for the collection of evidence in internal proceedings, especially when no clear legal entitlement to that evidence exists,” he ruled.