Do you remember the Department of Telecom (DoT) order in 2017 that made it mandatory for Indians to link Aadhaar number with SIM cards? The order is no longer available on the DoT website. In that order, the government had said that the Aadhaar-mobile number linking was mandatory because the Supreme Court said so. But a few days ago a lawyer representing TRAI had virtual agreed in front of a Supreme Court bench that the government misled people by saying that it was the top court that ordered the Aadhaar-mobile phone linking.

Currently if you try to access that DoT order, you will get an error saying that the "requested URL was rejected." It is not clear if this is a glitch or if it is a fallout of the government admission in the Supreme Court. The same URL, rather surprisingly, is accessible if you use a VPN server, so it seems that the DoT order is still online but Indians have been barred from accessing it. The DoT order was available at this link.

If it is a bug, it would be hopefully fixed soon. If it is an attempt by government to remove the order from the DoT website, chances are that the whole document will be soon taken offline. The order was issued on March 23, 2017.

Earlier, the Supreme Court that is hearing the constitutional challenge to Aadhaar had noted that it never specifically ordered linking of SIM cards with Aadhaar number. "In the Lokniti Foundation case, the SC has not directed linking of SIM with UID. But the Union government's circular says so. There was no direction by the court..." Justice D Y Chandrachud had said last week during the hearing, according to a report in Times of India.

To this senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, representing UIDAI, agreed. This was an admission that the government virtually lied in a bid to foist Aadhaar on people of India. "There was no such direction from the Supreme Court, but you took it and used it as tool to make Aadhaar mandatory for mobile users," the Supreme Court bench told the UIDAI advocate, according to news agency Press Trust of India.