SC to hear linking Aadhaar with voter ID, properties

Team Herald

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear after four weeks a PIL by Delhi BJP leader advocate Ashwini Upadhyaya on directions to the Election Commission to like the voter card with Aadhaar to curtail bogus votes and ensure maximum participation in the elections.

"We will take it up after four weeks," a Bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra told senior advocate Vikas Singh appearing for Upadhyaya. It, however, refused Singh's plea "to issue notice to the Centre in the meanwhile seeking its reply."

The PIL also seeks linkage of Aadhaar with movable and immovable property documents to put an end to the benami transactions.

It underlines that "as on date, the Aadhaar database is the most authenticate database of the citizens and chances of duplication is almost negligible as it is beyond the reams of possibility and probability to fudge biometric details, a pre-condition for Aadhaar enrollment."

"In the given circumstances, the use of Aadhaar details by the Election Commission will not only improve the overall health of electoral rolls by enabling deletion of duplicate entries but would also enable the Election Commission to provide additional services," the petition said.

On linking with the property it says: "Since most people already have an Aadhaar number, asking them to link it to their property documents is a better option. The main advantage of this strategy is that the tax authorities will get details about ‘legal owners’ (owner as per property documents) immediately. Several historical property deals might have happened in fictitious names and they will get stuck immediately. Several black money hoarders also used to register properties in other’s name (eg in the name of servants, family members who are poor, etc) after getting their signatures (these poor people have no idea what these signatures are meant for). 

In these cases, the original property documents are kept by the ‘original owner' and in most cases, they also keep power of attorney signed by legal owners.

"Once the Aadhaar linkage happens, tax authorities can approach the ‘legal owners’ and it can be treated as benami property if the ‘legal owners are unaware or denies knowledge of the ownership’. Even if the ‘legal owner’ takes onus and claims that it is his property, he needs to show the ‘source of income’ for buying that property (It will be difficult for a housemaid to show source for property worth crores)."