No Fundamental Right To Privacy, Maharashtra Argues Before Supreme Court
Privacy cannot be equated with liberty. It is a word without exactitude, Maharashtra government says.
There is no fundamental right to privacy and it is must not be accorded that status by the court, argued the state of Maharashtra before the Supreme Court on Thursday.
Senior Advocate Aryama Sundaram who is representing the State of Maharashtra said it was a deliberate decision by the founding fathers to keep privacy out of the ambit of fundamental rights and therefore now it should not be accorded that status.
“The aim of constituent assembly was to make fundamental rights as definite as possible'', Sundaram argued before the nine-judge bench which is hearing the matter.
The Centre, represented by Attorney General of India KK Venugopal, also told the court that while there must be some aspects of privacy which could fall in the realm of fundamental rights, the right to life will still hold primacy over right to privacy.
The government is ready to accept privacy as a fundamental right but only on a case-to-case basis, the Centre had argued before the Supreme Court a day before.
A five-judge Constitution bench of the apex court that was hearing the validity of Aadhaar and certain aspects of privacy had referred the limited matter of whether privacy is a fundamental right to a nine-judge bench. The nine-judge bench is re-examining whether the two earlier rulings – 1954 judgment in MP Sharma’s case and 1962 verdict in Kharak Singh’s case – are the correct expressions of the Constitution. An eight-judge and a six-judge bench, in the two cases, respectively, had held that there’s no fundamental right to privacy.
The nine-judge bench is being led by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar and includes Justices J Chelameswar, SA Bobde, RK Agrawal, Rohinton Fali Nariman, Abhay Manohar Sapre, DY Chandrachud, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Abdul Nazeer.
