The apex court has thankfully not granted permission to do this just yet, but now that arguments in the main Aadhaar case are almost finished, the judges will soon need to consider this request.

Whether the Court holds Aadhaar to be constitutional or not, the judges must ask serious questions to the Election Commission on the exercise thus far, from the standpoints of privacy and data protection. If the answers are unsatisfactory, not only will all the data previously collected need to be deleted, but stringent safeguards will need to be put in place to govern any such exercise in the future.

On the basis of the information we have now, these nine questions would be a good place to start: