On a Saturday night in early September 2026, a transport department team in Jaipur stopped a private Toyota Hilux and sought to take it for civic election duty. The family travelling in the vehicle said no written order was produced. When they asked officials not to take the vehicle so late at night, they were allegedly told they would face an FIR and arrest if they refused. A crowd gathered, and the matter was resolved only after the police arrived, nearly two hours later.

The statutory basis for this action is found in section 160 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 which allows the state to requisition private vehicles for election duty. A requisition is an official, formal request or demand for supplies, property, or services made by someone in authority. The Election Commission's own process shows that this power is exercised with a fair degree of procedural structure. It also shows that the vehicle owner does not have any real say in this decision.

Statutory Provision

Section 160 empowers a state government, where it appears that a vehicle 'is needed or is likely to be needed' for transporting ballot boxes, security personnel, or election staff, to requisition it by order in writing, served on the owner in the prescribed manner. The only vehicles the Act itself exempts are those already being used by a candidate or the candidate's agent for that candidate's own campaign, and only until polling ends. Beyond this, the Election Commission, in its official document has separately exempted certain categories by administrative instruction, including vehicles belonging to the WHO, UNICEF and other UN bodies, All India Radio, Doordarshan, and the Forest Department. Ordinary private vehicle owners fall outside every one of these categories.

Practical Implementation

Before the 2019 General Elections, a news report described the procedure in some detail, citing a public official. It stated that requisitioning is carried out through two channels: a district election officer inviting tenders and seeking vehicles for poll officials, and a separate roadside process at naka checks, where officers working with the RTO select vehicles from passing traffic. According to this report, the stated order of priority is to draw first on government vehicles, then commercial ones, and to treat private vehicles as a last resort, given the city's dependence on commercial transport. This sequencing is a genuine safeguard in the sense that private owners are not meant to be the first source drawn upon.

The same report describes the recourse available to an owner. A person whose vehicle has been requisitioned can write to the district election officer or, where the vehicle typically travels across districts, to the Chief Electoral Officer, explaining why daily life would be difficult without it, or apply through a dedicated mobile application for the same relief. An election commission official quoted in the report offered an assurance that 'the cars will not be taken over if problems stated are genuine'. It is worth noting that an owner's objection is treated like a request to be assessed for its genuineness by the same authority that decided to requisition the vehicle in the first place, not as a claim with a different body. The Election Commission's FAQ document, in describing how exemption works for staff requisitioned under the parallel provision in Section 159, notes that the power to requisition can be exercised irrespective of consent, with prosecution as the consequence of default. While that specific clause concerns polling staff rather than vehicle owners, it is on par with the design that runs through this part of the Act. The decision to requisition is not built around the consent of the person or property being requisitioned, and objections work as appeals for relief rather than as a right that must be independently adjudicated.

Supreme Court On Liability Of Requisitioned Vehicles

In March 2026, the Supreme Court decided DM and District Election Officer and Collector, Gwalior v. National Insurance Company Ltd , a case concerning liability for an accident involving a bus requisitioned for Gram Panchayat elections in Madhya Pradesh. Its reasoning turned on the non-consensual character of requisition. The Court observed that a 'requisition is not a voluntary arrangement; it is a command issued under statutory authority', and that once a vehicle is requisitioned, the owner is divested of custody and decision-making power, neither directing its use nor deriving any benefit from it during that period. This description was offered to explain why liability for the accident should rest with the state rather than the owner's insurer, since the owner had no say in how, when, or by whom the vehicle was used while it remained requisitioned. The litigation concerned only the consequences that follow after a vehicle is taken. Whether the owner should have had any say in the decision to take it did not arise, because the statute does not provide for that question to be asked.

Comparison For Need Of Legislative Attention

A useful point of contrast is how a restricted measure was debated in the United Kingdom. In 1931, the British House of Commons devoted a full sitting to a proposal limiting the number of cars a candidate could use to carry voters to the polls, concerning vehicles that owners had voluntarily made available, not vehicles taken from anyone. Members raised detailed objections concerning the effect on rural voters, the fairness of the formula for allocating car quotas. Members cited specific parishes to make the point concrete. In Oare, Somerset, no part of the electorate lived less than five miles from the polling station, across a hill two miles long with a gradient of one in five; the sixty registered electors there were expected to see barely a quarter turn out in a winter election without transport. In Berwick-on-Tweed, only six of forty-four polling districts had a majority of voters within walking distance of the poll, and in parts of Cardiganshire the distance ran to 33 miles each way. Members opposing the restriction argued that a flat national quota, whether based on the number of registered electors or the number of polling districts, could not account for this range of terrain, and that the government's own Amendment produced anomalies of its own, allotting sixteen cars to one Leicestershire constituency and 188 to another with a comparable electorate, purely because of how polling districts happened to be drawn. The debate closed with a further amendment, moved by a former Liberal leader, exempting constituencies exceeding 400 square miles from the restriction altogether, which passed by 233 votes to 205. The debate proceeded for several hours, examining a single clause. Section 160, which authorises the state to take a vehicle from an owner who has not volunteered it, has not received a comparable degree of legislative scrutiny in India's own parliamentary record.

Intent Behind This Design

None of this suggests that the underlying need is illegitimate. Elections require the movement of ballot boxes, security personnel, and staff across large numbers of polling stations, often in areas where commercial transport is limited, and the Commission's own stated practice of prioritising government and commercial vehicles before private ones reflects an awareness that requisitioning private property should not be the default option. But this process does not address the position of the owner once a private vehicle has been selected. The owner is not a party to the decision.

This is not an argument for removing the power altogether. A state that could not arrange for transport during elections at all would face a genuine logistical problem in districts where commercial vehicles are scarce, and a non-consensual power of this kind is not unusual. Public necessity has many times justified requisitioning of property without the owner's agreement, in contexts ranging from disaster response to eminent domain.

A more feasible version of this power would preserve the state's ability to requisition vehicles when genuinely needed, while requiring that an owner's objection be heard before the order takes effect by an officer distinct from the one issuing the requisition. It would also help if there is a consistent standard for grounds which warrant exemption, so that outcomes depend less on an individual official's assessment. Seventy-five years after the provision was enacted, and with considerably more government and commercial transport capacity available than in 1951, that adjustment seems reasonable.

Author is a 3rd year Law student at National Law University, Nagpur. Views are personal.