PTI, NEW DELHI: Terming Aadhaar as “an electronic leash”, a senior lawyer today told the Supreme Court that the government could completely destroy an individual by “switching off” the 12-digit unique identifier number. The argument was made before a five-judge Constititution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra which commenced hearing on a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the government’s flagship Aadhaar programme and its enabling Act of 2016.
However, the bench, also comprising Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, countered senior advocate Shyam Divan, asking whether the state “cannot say that it has every right to find out the number of schools, children or the real beneficiaries of a welfare scheme and verify the real beneficiaries of huge funds which it is spending, it needs Aadhaar number. This is a valid argument.”
It posed whether the government does not have the right to say that it was spending crores of rupees on welfare schemes and needed to verify whether benefits reached the needy and the leakages or pilferages of resources stopped. The bench also asked what will happen to the biometric data collected before the Aadhaar Act, 2016 — whether they will be destroyed if the petitioners challenging the validity of the Aadhaar programme succeeded.
Divan, who opened arguments on behalf of petitioners, said that through a succession of “marketing stratagems” and by employing “smoke and mirrors”, the government has rolled out a “little understood” programme that seeks to “tether every resident of India to an electronic leash”.
“This leash is connected to a central database that is designed to track transactions across the life of the citizen. This record will enable the State to profile citizens, track their movements, assess their habits and silently influence their behaviour. Over time, the profiling enables the State to stifle dissent and influence political decision making,” he argued.
