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Issue No. 4--Neither the respondent nor his counting agents obtained any assistance of the Returning Officer and Assistant Returning Officer at the time of counting of votes in furtherance of his election prospects by manipulating votes in his favour.
Issue No. 5--Neither the Returning Officer nor the Assistant Returning Officer committed illegalities and. irregularities in the recounting of votes as alleged in the petition.
Issue No. 6--No case for recount and scrutiny of votes has been made out.
"Not bound by law to consult you while giving my final judgment on the doubtful votes."

10. The tenor of the above application and the order made on it show that the stage at which an application can be made under Rule 63 for recount of votes had not been reached. According to that rule, a recount can be asked for after an announcement had been made on completion of the counting when the Returning Officer has recorded in the result-sheet in Form No. 20 the total number of votes polled by each candidate. The main complaint in the application filed by Bikram Singh on behalf of the appellant was that the decision about the doubtful votes had been taken by the Returning Officer in the absence of the candidates or their agents. The first prayer was that boothwise total may be announced and thereafter a grand total be made. The second prayer, of course, included the request for recounting of the total votes but the rule mentioned was 82. This rule does not have any connection with elections to the Vidhan Sabha but appears in Part VI and provides for recount at any time during the counting of votes at elections by Assembly members or in Council Constituencies. The position taken up on behalf of the appellant is that the aforesaid rule was mentioned by mistake. That, however, does not alter the fact that the recount was not asked under Rule 63 which could be done only after the total number of votes had been polled for each candidate had been recorded in the result-sheet in Form No. 20. The application of respondent No. 1, however, was clearly made in accordance with the provisions of that rule. This indicates that it was made subsequent to the application filed on behalf of the appellant.

In their Lordships' view, having regard to this infirmity the Tribunal was justified in declining to make an order in regard to inspection of ballot papers unless a prima facie case had been made out in support of the claim. They proceeded to say that the Tribunal would be justified in refusing an order where inspection was being claimed with a view to fish out material in support of a vague plea set out in the petition. In the other case Jabar Singh v. Genda Lal, AIR 1964 SC 1200, in which the point arose in a somewhat different manner, reference was made to the position under the English Law in regard to the recounting of votes in proceedings under election petitions and a passage from Halsbury's Laws of England, p. 306, was extracted and it was held that in holding an enquiry under Section 100(1)(d)(iii) or Section 101 of the Act, where Section 97 had not been complied with, it was not competent to the Tribunal to order a general recount of the votes preceded by a scrutiny about their validity. Both the above decisions were discussed by me in delivering the judgment of the Bench in Giani Kartar Singh v. Jagjit Singh, F. A. F. O. No. 3-E of 1964, dated 29th May 1964 (Punj), and I said that indisputably those two judgments contained an exhaustive statement of law on the question of allowing inspection and having scrutiny of votes when an election petition was being tried by a Tribunal.

16. Mr. Anand Swarup has contended that the discretion of the Returning Officer under Rule 63 (3) is very wide and the order for recount must be made by the Returning Officer almost as a matter of course unless the application is found to be frivolous or unreasonable. He has relied on the English Law with regard to the powers of the Returning Officer relating to recount of votes. In the English Rules (Parliamentary Elections Rules), Rule 47 is that a candidate or his election agent may, when the counting or any recount of the votes is completed, require the Returning Officer to have the votes recounted or again recounted but the Returning Officer may refuse to do so if in his opinion the request is unreasonable.