Court denies Army Major’s request for hotel CCTV footage to prove wife’s affair

The court upheld the hotel’s argument that granting such access would violate the privacy of guests and contravene internal policies

A Delhi court has rejected a plea by an Army major seeking access to CCTV footage and booking records from a hotel in Aerocity to support allegations of an extramarital affair between his wife and a junior colleague, citing the guests’ right to privacy.

The hotel’s lawyers argued that CCTV data is retained for only 90 days and that the footage in question was no longer available.(Pixabay/Representative)

In its May 22 order, civil judge Vaibhav Pratap Singh of Patiala House Courts dismissed the officer’s petition for a mandatory injunction directing the hotel to produce CCTV footage of common areas and booking details for two days in January.

The court upheld the hotel’s argument that granting such access would violate the privacy of guests and contravene internal policies.

The suit in question was filed by the officer, embroiled in a matrimonial dispute, who alleged that his wife and a colleague were engaged in an affair and sought the footage as evidence for both a pending divorce case and to lodge a complaint in internal Army proceedings. His plea named the hotel as a defendant but did not include either his wife or the colleague.

The hotel’s lawyers argued that CCTV data is retained for only 90 days and that the footage in question was no longer available. They also contended that furnishing guest records or surveillance footage would breach privacy assurances made to guests under the hotel’s code of conduct.

Agreeing with the hotel, the court said, “There is an expectation of privacy when one visits a hotel and most hotels thrive on assurances of said privacy and discretion... 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 legally justifiable entitlement to seek the data.”

The petitioner’s counsel had maintained that the information was crucial for internal disciplinary action within the Army and for divorce proceedings. However, the court ruled that using private litigation to compel disclosure of third-party data would be “speculative and unsupported,” and equated it to conducting a “roving inquiry” in the hope of gathering evidence.

Noting that the wife and the man she allegedly had the extramarital affair with were not party to the suit, the court said releasing private information without giving them a chance to defend their rights would amount to a breach of natural justice and their fundamental right to privacy. “It could lead to reputational harm,” the judge observed.

The court also reprimanded the petitioner for misusing the legal process to collect evidence for internal disciplinary proceedings. “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 legal entitlement to that evidence exists,” the order stated.

The court said, “The 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”.

The court noted that the petitioner is only pursuing a case against his colleague, as if his wife is not to be blamed and only the colleague is, and that if not for him, the otherwise successful marriage would have endured.

The order read, “The plaintiffs selective blame and pursuit of the paramour fails to acknowledge that adultery may not be the cause of a marriage’s failure -- it may merely be a symptom”.

Quoting from the novel, The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene, the court said that the burden of fidelity rests with the one who made the promise. “It is not the lover who has betrayed the marriage, but the one who made the vow and broke it. The outsider was never bound by it”.

The court also mentioned how the Indian Parliament, while doing away with the colonial penal law, enacted the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, and did not retain the offence of adultery, “showing that modern day Bharat has no place doe gender condescension and patriarchal notions”.