The only conclusion is that the Supreme Court itself cares very little for compliance with its own judgments. It is therefore astonishing that the government has offered a semblance of compliance with one part of the SC judgment – a gazette notification dated Feb. 13 (a day after Parliament’s adjournment) amended the Prevention of Money Laundering (Maintenance of Records) Rules, 2005, to reflect that the Aadhaar number can no longer be demanded by banks or other financial companies.

Significantly, this is the first time the Union has toed the Supreme Court line with regard to Aadhaar. Even so, the judgment gives the government effectively a free hand, albeit with some slaps on the wrist, to maintain the status quo on Aadhaar particularly for subsidies and welfare schemes covered under Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act.

The voluntarily-mandatory danse macabre continues uninterrupted. Both the government and the UIDAI have been trigger-happy announcing other means of using Aadhaar for authentication – offline Aadhaar, QR code, virtual id, etc. This enthusiasm of course does not carry over to ensuring the swift passage of a data protection law, of which we have heard precious little since the judgment. The draft Data Protection Bill developed by the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee, which itself is hugely problematic, is yet to be presented to Parliament, and no further public consultation appears likely.

There is enough evidence in the public domain to question not just the implementation of the Aadhaar scheme, but its very intent as well as the proto-dictatorial functioning of the UIDAI. The constant drumming of spurious Aadhaar-related savings by Union ministers continues despite repeated denouncing. We are asked to believe that the Aadhaar ecosystem is secure simply on the strength of claims (and PowerPoint presentations) made by Mr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey or Mr. R.S. Sharma.

We need to demand that the government – whether this one or the one that follows – take a hard account of the Aadhaar project in total; that they look at not just the human cost (the mounting hunger deaths besides delay/denial of various subsidies) but also the economic cost – the savings claims made never take into account the government’s and UIDAI’s expense in managing and operating the Aadhaar project. As some researchers have pointed out, it is almost certain that the government, far from saving, is actually losing money on the Aadhaar project.

Such an auditing of the project is long overdue, but it is not merely about the numbers; the question begging to be asked is whether Indian taxpayers are willing to foot the bill for a project that is effectively killing off fellow citizens while endangering the lives and livelihoods of billions via endangering their data, collected coercively by a regime that cares not an iota about the security thereof.

Those defending the Aadhaar project often glibly state that any such exclusion is likely to affect “only 1%”. Are we trigger happy consigning 1% of India’s population – over 1.3 crore people – to extreme marginalisation, even death, to further a project that appears designed only to generate private profit through monetising our personal data?

Further, are we factoring in the “function creep” through which not possessing an Aadhaar number can today limit citizens’ choices in terms of meaningful livelihood and financial security, through cancelation of their PAN cards and denial of their Public Provident Fund savings?

The somewhat dichomotous Supreme Court judgment is a reflection of the schism in our society around the utility of Aadhaar. For many of us, the minority opinion of Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, which unambigiously declared the Aadhaar scheme unconstitutional, is a vindication of years of tedius truth-telling. More so, even the majority judgment authored by Justice A.K. Sikri curtailed the use of Aadhaar significantly.

Yet, ths majority judgment fails the poorest of the poor, those who were to benefit most from the Aadhaar project, while failing to address adequately the concerns around data security and mismanagement of the project.

The Supreme Court’s judgment may or may not be reviewed anytime soon, and the outcomes of such reviews also remain unpredictable. It therefore falls to us, the people of India, to demand an answer from the government as to the actual cost of the Aadhaar project and whether it is socially, economically, politically wise to continue the project.

Not many believe that support for the Aadhaar project has electoral consequence, but the results of the Chhattisgarh Assembly Elections as well as the latest notification from the government amending the PMLA rules suggest that there is some electoral calculation. Aadhaar may appear to have passed muster in the Supreme Court, but it still remains sub judice in the people’s court.