The Supreme Court appears nonchalant even though the government defies its interim order and makes Aadhaar mandatory for the delivery of subsidies, benefits and other entitlements, threatening the citizen’s constitutionally guaranteed rights.
THE LEGAL CHALLENGE TO MAKING IT mandatory for Indian citizens to part with their demographic and biometric information and assigning them unique identity numbers ostensibly to ensure efficient delivery of subsidies, benefits and services under the Aadhaar Act, 2016, has witnessed several twists and turns.
In Round One, the public interest litigation petitioners—including a former High Court judge, a retired major general and an activist espousing the cause of manual scavengers—who challenged the Act’s previous avatar, the Aadhaar scheme, succeeded in persuading the Supreme Court to confine the voluntary use of Aadhaar to six specified schemes. That was on October 15, 2015, when a five-judge Constitution Bench modified the previous order of a three-judge bench in August that year to accommodate the Central government’s growing appetite for including more and more schemes under the Aadhaar umbrella even though the Supreme Court’s larger bench was yet to adjudicate on its very constitutionality.
Round Two: wherein the Supreme Court found itself unable to go ahead and adjudicate on the issue expeditiously and, therefore, has been prevaricating since October 2015. The balance of advantage appeared to tilt increasingly in favour of the respondent in the case, the Union of India, which began to brazenly violate the Supreme Court’s restrictions on making Aadhaar mandatory and still manage to avoid the kind of strictures that an ordinary litigant not complying with the court’s directives could expect in the normal course of events.
This story is from the April 28, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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This story is from the April 28, 2017 edition of FRONTLINE.
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