Aadhaar Is An Architecture For Mass Surveillance, Petitioners Argue
The government has not come up with specific answers to concerns raised against Aadhaar, argue petitioners.
The government has not been able come up with specific responses to concerns raised against Aadhaar, petitioners argued during the ongoing Supreme Court hearing on the constitutional validity of the biometric identity.
The focus in the first half was on the state governments’ repositories that collect Aadhaar data. These state resident data hubs had no statutory backing and should be completely dismantled, Senior Advocate Shyam Divan said, arguing for the petitioners.
He said an earlier government affidavit which claimed that the Aadhaar architecture is incapable of 360 degree profiling “is incorrect”.
Collation of data by state resident data hubs enables religion-based profiling, caste-based profiling, community-based profiling, potential targeting of individuals and communities. This also leads to a pervasive loss of privacy.Shyam Divan, Senior Advocate
Divan urged the five-judge bench to anticipate the dangers of making available names of people and communities for the Aadhaar programme.
During the hearing, Justice Chandrachud observed that in some cases aggregation of data may lead to better deliveries of benefits by weeding out fake beneficiaries. The court needs to consider how to balance the two concerns, he said.
In the second half of the hearing today, arguments shifted to certain Constitutional principles and how the Aadhaar programme violates them. Concepts such as rule of law, constitutionalism and limited government have been recognised by the Constitution as well as successive judgements of the court, Divan said. ‘’State cannot be allowed to expand to this level where it has such a huge dominance over the citizens.”
The concept of limited government, Divan said, does not allow the state the power to deny citizens their rights which they are otherwise entitled to unless they identify themselves only in one particular manner.
There was also a brief discussion on the concept of exclusion—how people were being denied their rights for the lack of an Aadhaar card. When the bench enquired about the number of such exclusions, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal suggested a government audit on the numbers of authentication failures which would be submitted before the court.
Senior Advocate Shyam Divan will resume the arguments on behalf of petitioners on Thursday.