On February 6, Sanjay Dhotre, minister of state for Electronics and IT, informed the Rajya Sabha (reply to Unstarred question No.527 which enquired about Aadhaar cards), that “Seven states have Aadhaar more than the projected population as on December 31, 2019," He further stated that the “Estimated number of deaths of Aadhaar holders has been accounted in Aadhaar saturation. These could be attributed to error in projection of population, migration of population etc.” and that “There is no plan to flag deceased Aadhaar holders [even if documents relating to the deceased person were submitted to the Aadhaar authorities].”

While this bit of information caused the jaws of many people to drop, those who have been campaigning against Aadhaar for years merely smile and shake their heads sadly as if to say “We-told-you -so”.

At the heart of the entire protest of Aadhaar are three issues:

It is an exercise in authentication, not identification.

The process involved in registering applicants and then issuing them Aadhaar cards is so flawed that it has led to many more Aadhaar cards being issued fraudulently to bogus identities that may not even exist .

The way the NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) is structured, lends analysts to believed that it will only promote the payment of subsidy and entitlement amounts to beneficiaries and will not leave behind any trace of how much money they have received and even details of the (earlier) bank account into which they had received the sums.

The admission before the Rajya Sabha is an implicit confirmation of the first two fears. That more Aadhaar cards have been issued compared to the population. Moreover, since more Aadhar cards – greater than even the population – have been issued, quite obviously the card holders would have assumed bogus or non-existent personalities.

This also leads to the next question. If the government cannot even get the issuance of Aadhaar done in a scientific and foolproof manner – despite years of planning, and mobilising huge resources at its command – how will it ever implement a citizenship register? If the basic certification of religions is not possible (except maybe for Christians, Parsis and Jews, where some sort of register of community members already exists), and if Aadhaar cards themselves are not reliable, can the recently enacted Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) be implemented? Would it not be more sensible to first do an audit of all Aadhaar cards? What is equally disturbing is that (as testified before the Rajya Sabha) Aadhaar will also be one of the documents used to identify a citizen.

It also leads to a bigger and more crucial question – was the Supreme Court not right when it ordered that Aadhaar cards should not be used to open bank accounts – though payment of entitlements through Aadhaar into bank accounts has been permitted? And isn’t it dangerous to link Aadhaar to PAN cards, especially since Aadhaar can be used to get new PAN cards issued? Thus, you will have bogus Aadhaar and bogus PAN cards as well. That will muddy waters further.