Bareily constituency and had held herself out as a candidate for this constituency. This holding out had to take place by the Prime Minister herself and not by the Congress Committee. Even if the fact of a declaration made by the Congress Committee, on 29-1-1971, which is all that the written statement admits, proves that the Prime Minister was chosen by her party for this particular constituency on this date, her own decision on the matter could only come and was proved by her to have actually come later than that. This admission was in my opinion, misconstrued by the learned Judge as a contradiction. In the absence of any evidence whatsoever which could conflict with the Prime Minister's statement about the actual date of her final decision to stand from this Constituency, it seems to me that the learned Judge had no option reasonably open to him except to accept the correctness of the only and the best evidence on this question available in the case. The learned Judge in observing, quite unnecessarily, that his finding on this question was not going to be affected by the importance of the office held by the Prime Minister, seems, subconsciously, to have been so affected by it that he did not act on the normal rule that the best evidence of a person's state of mind is his or her own statements and actions and not of others. He seems to have felt that judicial independence comsists in inverting this rule and judging the matter primarily from the evidence of the states of minds and opinions and actions of other individuals in the case of a Prime Minister of this country. I do not consider this to be a judicially correct approach. 452. The fact that the tour programmes were circulated in advance for the Rae Bareily District, in which the Prime Minister made electioneering speeches, could also not determine what the final declaration of intention by the Prime Minister was going to be in regard to the Rae Bareily constituency. It is not enough that the candidate should have by then formed an intention to stand from a particular constituency. There is a gap between intent and action which has to be filled by proof of either statements or of conduct which amount to unequivocal declarations made to voters in the constituency in order to amount to a “holding out” to them. This seems to me to be the clear position in the law as laid down by Courts in this country on the meaning of Section 79(b) of the Act. 453. It is significant that despite the large number of speeches and statements the Prime Minister must have made throughout the country, in this period, not a single statement made by her could even be cited in which she had said before 1-2-1971, that she was standing as a candidate from the Rae Bareily constituency. It is possible, as I have indicated above, that this may be a part of the political game or permissible party tactics so as to keep opposition parties guessing. It seems to me that the learned Judge was overlooking the context, the probabilities, the natural course of events in such a case, the legal and logical relevance and effect of what he thought was decisive, and finally, the importance of the statement of the Prime Minister herself on this question supported by complete absence of any evidence to show that she had herself made any clear and decisive statement in any speech or conversation which could shake her stand that her final decision